Communicating with caps: managing usage caps in home networks

Abstract

As Internet service providers increasingly implement and impose "usage caps", consumers need better ways to help them understand and control how devices in the home use up the available network resources or available capacity. Towards this goal, we will demonstrate a system that allows users to monitor and manage their usage caps. The system uses the BISMark firmware running on network gateways to collect usage statistics and report them to a logically centralized controller, which displays usage information. The controller allows users to specify policies about how different people, devices, and applications should consume the usage cap; it implements and enforces these policies via a secure OpenFlow control channel to each gateway device. The demonstration will show various use cases, such as limiting the usage of a particular application, visualizing usage statistics, and allowing users within a single household to "trade" caps with one another.