Server support approach to zero configuration in-home networking

Abstract

This paper proposes a new server support approach to zero configuration in-home networking. We show three technical issues for zero configuration. Lack of a protocol or technique addressing all issues simultaneously motivated us to design a new approach based on (1) a two-stage autoconfiguration, (2) a UPnP and http-based autoconfiguration, and (3) extended UPnP services. An elaborated flow for the global Internet connection from scratch will be presented. The proposed approach can obtain software and settings from remote servers, and updates/configures for devices. We implemented a system based on the proposed approach, and evaluated its total autoconfiguration time, and the number of technical calls to a help desk during a field trial for five months. We delivered a user-side configuration tool and an all-in-one modem to approximately 230,000 new aDSL subscribers as part of the trial system. Over 40 settings are properly configured for diverse devices in 14 minutes and 10 seconds, while the ratio of the number of calls to the number of new subscribers per month decreased from 14.9% to 8.2%. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2004.