Portable Profiles for Residential Gateways

A residential gateway can offer services that are configurable by a user depending on current needs or preferences. A set of these preferences can be grouped to form a user profile. One user may own several profiles depending on the environment (home or office) or time (working time or weekend). This article proposes Smart Cards for storing profiles and maintaining profiles in a secure and portable way. Each user owns one Smart Card containing several profiles. With the help of Smart Cards, profiles will be enabled or disabled in the moment the card is introduced into a reader device of a residential network. The auto-configuration features of a residential gateway are extended to read the Smart Card's information and to reconfigure the behaviour of the network including its services. This reconfiguration is supported by remote management tools. On demand, the configuration of a network might be stored on the Smart Card and thus an existing profile is modified or a new profile is added.