Abstract: Autonomy is an effective approach to cracking some hard nuts in an intelligent system. In this study on intelligent home network, the focus is placed on the implementation of autonomy of a device. For this reason, some related concepts such as Virtual Device are introduced in this study. Consisting of a family of function agents and possessing the ability for auto-configuration, auto-announcement, auto-service discovery and so on, a virtual device interacts with users or surrounding devices on behalf of the physical one. Based on the virtual device, the autonomy of a device as well as the entire home network is implemented.