By Joe Trujillo and Chris Kohler, Motorola Mobility, Inc.
The home router has become a power house of performance, enabling a dizzying number of devices in the home to communicate with each other and the internet at ever growing bandwidth and capacity.
With all this impressive brawn, it is easy to overlook the router’s potential for brains.
The home router is an always-on device that is completely intimate to the physical and logical connectivity between devices on the home network and their connections to the internet. That intimacy makes the home router uniquely positioned to host a variety of applications.
In this paper, the authors discuss some of the applications that can supply a brain to accompany the brawn for next generation routers. Some example applications discussed relate to Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication for home control and security, Personal Content Management, and Advanced Home Network Management. While this list is not exhaustive, it gives a fair idea about the possibilities and opportunities for the Service Provider to move up the value chain, while continuing to delight the customer.