An NFV approach to share home multimedia devices

In the last years, the two networking paradigms Software Defined Networks (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), are driving the Internet evolution from a pure transport network, to a user-centric platform providing customers with different levels of quality according to their needs. By leveraging on these technologies, the European project INPUT has defined the concept of Personal Networks, an extension of the user's home Local Area Network (LAN), also including virtual images of physical devices. In this context, for many reasons that will be presented in the paper, it could be very useful to export a real hardware or software resource, that is physically or virtually located in the same Personal Network of a given user (e.g. a smart TV or a virtual set-top-box), to another Personal Network. With this in mind, this paper proposes the architecture that allows to instantiate a virtual presence in a Personal Network, in such a way that it allows using it as present locally in the visited personal network. The presented results are compliant with the SDN/NFV platform developed within the EU project INPUT.