Expanding home services with advanced gateways

Abstract

The success of over-the-top (OTT) services reflects users' demand for personalization of digital services at home. ISPs propose fulfilling this demand with a cloud delivery model, which would simplify the management of the service portfolio and bring them additional revenue streams. We argue that this approach has many limitations that can be fixed by turning the home gateway into a flexible execution platform. We define requirements for such a "service-hosting gateway" and build a proof of concept prototype using a virtualized Intel Groveland system-on-a-chip platform. We discuss remaining challenges such as service distribution, security and privacy, management, and home integration.