Contribución a las arquitecturas de virtualización de funciones de red y redes definidas por software aplicadas a las redes residenciales con gestión centrada en el usuario

Abstract

This dissertation addresses three specific problems found nowadays in residential networks. Firstly, the restricted usability that residential networks offer due to the fact that a technical knowledge, which the majority of users lack, is required to exert management tasks. Secondly, the high degree of heterogeneity of the residential environment in terms of user profiles, end devices and network technologies. And thirdly, the limited flexibility of current network equipment to improve the connectivity service provided by the residential network, which makes it difficult to add new network functionalities required by today's multimedia services. According to the state of the art, the problems described above are the result of the Internet-like network model established for the residential network, which relies on a good level of technical expertise of administrators. Added to this is the lack of flexibility that current networking model presents to evolve a network service and adapt it to the dynamic, demanding and diverse requirements of, for example, multimedia applications and enterprise network services. In this context, the first contribution of this dissertation is the design of a new management architecture for residential networks that takes advantage of the new paradigms of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN) to allow using a user-centric approach and to facilitate its implementation. In this architecture, users actively participate in the management tasks of their own networks by using Residential Network Management applications, referred to as "RENEMA apps". These apps, which are adapted to the skills of an average user, allow customizing the network based on the user's preferences, improving the usability of the network and facing the high degree of heterogeneity that the residential environment presents. On the other hand, to facilitate the implementation of the usercentric approach, the architecture provides different Residential Network Services (RENESEs) to abstract the low-level network configuration and monitoring. Thus, RENEMA apps developers would not have to cope with them.