Many residential and small business users connect to the Internet via home gateways, such as DSL and cable modems. The characteristics of these devices heavily influence the quality and performance of the Internet service that these users receive. Anecdotal evidence suggests that an extremely diverse set of behaviors exists in the deployed base, forcing application developers to design for the lowest common denominator. This paper experimentally analyzes some characteristics of a substantial number of different home gateways: binding timeouts, queuing delays, throughput, protocol support and others.

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Devices capable of multi-connectivity currently use static rules for selecting the set of interfaces to use. Such rules are limited in scope and can be counter-productive. We posit that SDN techniques can address this inefficiency. We present an approach that enables an SDN controller to manage the flows traversing the Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and LTE links in our laptop and also migrate the flows from one link to another. Our solution opens avenues that enable end-user device to negotiate with the network controllers when taking its control plane decisions.

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Our devices can use a wide range of communication technologies such as multiple cellular technologies (4G/5G), WiFi, and also Ethernet. At the same time, applications have a choice of a wide range of transport protocols such as QUIC and TCP that can be fine-tuned and optimized according to their needs. However, in spite of these advances, offering seamless multiconnectivity to applications continues to be a hard problem.The key factors that continue to be a roadblock towards achieving seamless multiconnectivity include a) applications cannot specify the communication technologies to be used by their flows, and b) the traditional definition of a connection endpoint was not designed to support mobile nodes. In this paper we discuss the key challenges that make this problem hard. We also present MULTI, a session layer approach that can be leveraged to address some of the key sub-problems of this problem. For instance, we observe that MULTI incurred a small overhead (less than 5% decrease in throughput) when using TCP compared to the native asyncio python library.

Our homes, offices, and other spaces are expected to evolve into smart spaces served by devices having varying requirements and capabilities. To efficiently control and manage these devices, their controllers needs to be designed using the correct abstraction for the devices. In this paper, we present an abstraction for the devices in smart spaces, and we use this abstraction to present a 5D-deploy, discovery, decision, dissemination, and data-approach to control and manage smart spaces. We also discuss three approaches to design controllers for smart spaces, and highlight how controllers can leverage recent research in distributed systems. We believe that our abstraction for devices, our 5D approach, and our approaches for designing controllers are building blocks for transforming our spaces to smart spaces.

Offering seamless connectivity to devices capable of simultaneously using multiple communication interfaces continues to be a hard problem. This problem is important for edge computing because edge services may be available only on a subset of networks to which the device is capable of connecting to. We argue that various aspects of this problem can be addressed by leveraging the current trends of using user space libraries for networking, and allowing control plane negotiations between user devices and networks.

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