Enhancing Visibility into Home Networks using SDN

The home network, typically shared by many household members and devices, is getting increasingly complex, yet neither ISPs nor subscribers have much visibility into aspects such as device connectivity patterns, user data consumption, and suitability of sites visited. In this paper we propose, develop, deploy, and evaluate a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based approach to enhancing visibility into home networks. We first develop an SDN architecture that leverages commodity residential gateway hardware and cloud-based software to provide real-time visibility into devices connected in the home, their data consumption patterns on an hourly and daily basis, and the domains visited by each device. We deploy our fully-functional system in selected households, and analyze their activity data collected over a month. Finally we analyze this data to present insights in terms of number and composition of connected devices, video-viewing patterns of data-intensive devices, and content preferences based on web-sites visited.