Grants and Contracts Details
Description
B. Project Summary
Home broadband adoption in the US and abroad is growing, and fueling an increase in home networking.
The economic and societal gains to be had from ubiquitous broadband adoption are potentially huge.
However, despite obvious interest on the part of home users, concerns about complexity of home
networking hinder the more widespread adoption of broadband technologies. Significantly, people
cite complexity of the technology as being the key impediment to adopting home networking technologies.
The networking architecture in the home today is not significantly different than that of the 1970's
minicomputer era, which assumed trained network administrators to deploy and manage networks. Thus,
end-users today must be exposed to concepts-IP addressing, subnet maks, routers, firewalls, and so
forth-which are more properly the domain of skilled network administrators.
We propose to lower the barrier to the adoption and use of home networking by designing human-centered
networking technologies that support end-users in their networking tasks. Specifically, this project will
combine research from both Networking and Human-Computer Interaction to develop and evaluate a
new networking architecture for the home, as well as tools built upon this architecture. The overall goals of
the work are to (i) understand the sources of complexity and user frustration in home networks, (ii) extract
core architectural principles that promote simple, usable, robust, and secure networks in environments that
share the unique characteristics of the home, and (iii) develop and evaluate architectures and tools that
embody those principles. Successful execution of this project will fuel the diffusion of broadband
technology and the applications it makes possible.
Intellectual Merit
The intellectual merit in this proposal derives from its interdisciplinary collaboration between Networking
and HCI research. This means that we ground the requirements for our architecture in empirical studies of
the current practices, needs, and mental models of home networking users; the efficacy of resulting designs
will be evaluated through both user- and network-centric techniques. This synthesis of techniques from
both disciplines is necessary for addressing the deep usability problems of home networking. The network
architecture we develop as a part of this proposal represents a new approach to achieving demonstrably
better usability for end-users, by providing intuitive device provisioning, easier creation of trust
associations among devices, more robust device discovery facilities, and user-appropriate tools for
monitoring and management of the home network.
Broader Impact
The sheer number of home users who now cope with their networks makes the impact of this proposal
broad. By making it possible for end-users to provision, configure, and manage their networks, we can
facilitate the adoption of applications that require sophisticated network infrastructures, and consequently
begin to realize economic and societal gains associated with the next wave of computing innovations. Not
only do we expect impacts in terms of usability and economic effects, we also believe that the combination
of Networking and HCI research will advance the state of the knowledge about how to design networks that
are innately easy to use by unskilled users. In addition, the architectural insights we develop for home
networking can be expected to apply in other contexts (e.g. small businesses) as well. The results of this
work will be integrated into coursework, research projects, and degree programs at the two collaborating
universities, and will influence the training of both Networking and HCI researchers and professionals.
TPI 6569542
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 9/1/06 → 8/31/10 |
Funding
- National Science Foundation: $186,583.00
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