Development of Internet Home Server to Control Information Appliances Remotely

Abstract

As the Internet and home networking technologies are developing rapidly, more users want to control their home appliances from a remote location, i.e. from outside the home via the Internet. However, some problems hinder them from doing so. First, an IP address is allocated dynamically to a subscriber to utilize the limited resources by the network service providers. As a result, it is difficult for users to make connections from outside the home to the home network. Secondly, for security, firewalls or proxies may be installed on the home network. This causes similar problem, too. In this paper, we propose a new approach to solve these problems and present our implementation. We built an Internet Home Server (IHS) outside the home, not inside of it, and it provides similar functions to those of the home server. Through IHS, users can be guaranteed to connect to home appliances from a remote location.