Project DOMUS
DOMUS is a research project conducted by the Laboratory of Communications and Telematic Services of the University of Coimbra.
The goal of the Project is to produce a unified gateway platform able to support – with improved modularity and maintenance requirements – the whole range of domestic/SOHO services enabled by broadband internet, such as secure internet access, VoIP (including Fax and Voice Mail), VCoIP, VoD, media centers, remote surveillance, telemetering, home automation, local NAS and print services.
These functionalities are currently hosted, at best, by small dedicated boxes such as broadband routers, with a short number of supported services and poor flexibility. New services require on-site installation of additional equipment, increasing service setup costs. Besides, end-users are often required to explicitly configure, administer and upgrade these boxes, an obstacle to large-scale deployment of new services.
The PC platform is powerful and flexible enough to integrate present and forthcoming services in a single box. However, its maintenance costs are too high, due to the complexity of the PC architecture, restraining its widespread use in real world scenarios. PCs are less reliable than small dedicated routers, interactions between different services are unpredictable, and current PC software requires more maintenance than the average user is willing to cope with. We intend to show that the PC platform might become, nevertheless, a very attractive base for multi-service broadband gateways. In order to do that, we will tackle identified problems following three specific lines of work, aggregated in a final proof-of-concept gateway:
1. Definition of a hardware reference model based on of-the-shelf, low-cost PC components able to provide an expandable, reliable and manageable small form factor box for multi-service gateways.
2. Research of enabling technologies for cost-effective PreOS management. Without mechanisms allowing the gateway to automatically and transparently recover from failures that prevent the normal load of the operating system, PC-based gateways will become too costly. In the last couple of years we developed a consistent framework for desktop management in LAN environments. Taking advantage of recent industry standards such as PXE, we are able to remotely install a management agent even before the operating system is loaded. This makes it possible, for instance, to recover from otherwise fatal problems such as severe OS misconfiguration or file system corruption. Although current standards still lack support for ADSL and wireless environments, we intend to study means to provide PreOS management mechanisms in such environments.
3. The design of an open software architecture for modular service addition. This architecture – based on a simplified Linux distribution – integrates the various service modules in a common framework that offers controlled access to hardware resources and a remote management interface for tasks like installation of new services, service upgrade, monitoring, user authentication and accounting.