H-box: Interconnecting devices across local networks

Abstract

Sharing of devices across separate networks is currently challenging. Users may want to give their friends remote access to their home entertainment devices, but a secure and easy-to-use solution has not yet emerged. While service discovery frameworks provide a uniform interface for different networked devices to interact, most of them, especially the widely adopted Universal Plug and Play, fail to connect devices in separate networks. This paper proposes a proxy-based architecture H-box that bridges different UPnP-based networks. We integrate a number of standardized protocols, namely XMPP, HIP and Teredo in a novel way to achieve our goal. The prototype runs on Raspberry Pi, bridging commodity UPnP devices located in remote networks. The performance evaluation shows that the approach is feasible even for media streaming between homes. Further, we envision the H-box architecture to be adopted for car entertainment systems and extended to support device sharing and collaboration between separate networks.