Home networking as a distributed file system view

Abstract

Devices forming a Home Network have different capabilities and interfaces, discouraging users to organize their large digital content libraries. To help users, we propose to organize the Home Network according to a gateway-centric architecture, where the content access unification is realized at the file system level and where no additional software installation on devices is required. Solutions for realizing this unification individually exist for the various devices making up the Home Network (UPnP/DLNA devices, personal computers, cloud storage systems, etc). Unifying the content access at the file system level offers a powerful lever for many legacy applications, as far as these applications can access all shared data in the Home Network. Users can thus continue to use their PC's file manager or favorite media player to browse or display shared content. An indexing application, running on the gateway, possibly managed by the ISP and accessible from any device via a simple web interface, enables more powerful content retrieval and user experience. Such application may be enriched to offer additional services like content format adaptation, duplication detection or automatic backup. Lastly we describe how this gateway-centric architecture can be leveraged by cloud applications such as distributed storage systems.