A remote control scheme for ubiquitous personal computing

In the schemes designed for ubiquitous computing, remote access to private data is generally achieved by requiring users to deposit the data on certain always-on-line servers in the network infrastructure. However, when the data to be accessed remotely is somewhat sensitive, as implied by many applications of personal computing, users may prefer to warehouse the data in their residences rather than in some public places. In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed to realize personal computing ubiquitously by satisfying such demand. The proposed scheme employs home-automation techniques to grant properly authenticated users remote access to the data stored somewhere off the infrastructure (e.g., their personal workstations) while avoiding the expense of deploying high-availability servers at home. It also provides three kinds of authentication mechanisms and hence allows users to choose among different levels of the tradeoff between security and ubiquity, providing a complete solution for ubiquitous personal computing.