A Novel Approach to Support the Visual Exploration and Management of Heterogeneous Home Area Network Devices and Services

Abstract

With the advance of home networking technologies, people now enjoy increased communications convenience whilst occasionally suffering annoyance from trivial issues. The automated application of appropriate expertise can support ordinary users in managing and diagnosing their own network, despite being unfamiliar with the basic technologies. This presents a significant opportunity to increase user satisfaction and reduce support costs. As a part of my PhD research, this paper proposes an expert knowledge derived approach to manage, diagnose and resolve network problems in real time through a user-friendly visual interface derived from semantically annotated heterogeneous raw network monitoring data. This approach has been implemented in an early prototype - Home Area Network Monitoring System (HANMS). A detailed description of the current stage of this research and future work is addressed in this paper.