家互通訊與網路技術之設計與實作

Abstract

由於公眾社群網路服務快速發展與茁壯，一般使用者可透過社群網路分享個人照片、影片和其它各式檔案，但仍無法直接和親朋好友分享具有網路功能的裝置(例如：網路攝影機、多媒體播放器等)。而家戶通訊在未來亦將成為另一種新的通訊型態以補足社群網路的不足。藉由家戶通訊網路，大眾能輕易且安全地與家人或其他家庭的成員分享網路裝置的各式內容。然而家戶通訊將面臨三個問題，包括：網路的形成、NAT穿透以及安全防護。網路的形成主要是使用者如何透過邀請親朋好友形成private cloud並分享檔案。而當使用者位於NAT內部時，由於不同的NAT可能會有不同的行為，故使用者需要NAT穿透技術和親朋好友建立直接連線，否則必須選擇一個第三方節點來轉送分享的內容。由於我們無法確保網路上皆為正常與合法的使用者，在形成private cloud與傳送資料的過程中，使用者的認證、授權與資料保全皆為不可或缺的一部份。故本計畫將以建構家戶通訊網路為目標針對上述問題進行研究並設計與實作相關技術，包含研發不同的傳輸技術、路徑切換技術、中繼節點選擇機制和負載平衡機制；對於NAT穿透的問題亦有UDP與TCP穿透技術的研發；同時也設計動態群體安全通訊機制以解決資料安全的問題。

The goal of this three-year project is to design and implement enabling technologies for Home-to-Home Communications and Networking. The blooming of public social networking services makes it easier for people to share their photos, videos and other contents with others in such public cloud. However, people still cannot share contents among them directly and easily with their own Internet connected devices. Furthermore, such Internet connected devices become more and more popular, home-to-home (or site-to-site) communications will be likely to serve as the next generation communication paradigm that complements the public social cloud services. With home-to-home networks, people can share, easily and securely, variety contents with their own family or with members of other families using various devices. In other words, we can form private clouds as needed for various content sharing services, such as live broadcasting, file sharing and instant message services.However, home-to-home communications may encounter three problems, network formation, NAT traversal, and security. Network formation means how a user initiates his/her private clouds by inviting his/her family member and friends. Also, it includes how the user transmits his/her contents to others. Furthermore, when the user is behind an NAT, he/she will need NAT traversal technologies to overcome the hindrance posed by NATs with various behaviors. The traversal technologies may establish a direct connection between the user and a peer, if possible； or an indirect path that needs other third party peers (relay nodes) to forward contents on behalf of the user. Last but not least, we need security mechanism, such as authentication, authorization, and encryption, to enforce security in network formation and content transmission for Home-to-Home communication because malicious users may exists in Internet. Accordingly, this project tries to resolve above three problems by adapting various techniques, such as configurable transmission modules, path-switch module, relay node selection and load balance mechanism for network formation, UDP and TCP NAT traversal techniques for NAT traversal, and dynamic secure group communication mechanism for security enforcement.