| Recently, there has been an increase in the development in technologies related to Home Networks exploiting the untapped research potential in the home environment. This surge of research in Home Networks has led to the invention of many, capable smart devices that can be used to automate the functioning of homes. A modern home contains many sophisticated devices and technologies compliant with different protocols. Automation in such heterogeneous environments cannot be effectively achieved without the support of a middleware layer. The key element for success in home networks is interoperability among the heterogeneous devices operating in the network. Ideally, all the devices that participate in the network would run the same standard protocols for device discovery, configurations, and control. However, there is no standard that has been accepted by the major industry players and a de-facto standard has been slow to arise. This lack of a unified standard has resulted in a large number of technologies including UPnP, Jini, and HAVi that satisfy the requirements of a small, confined Home Network with homogeneous devices.;The objective of this thesis is to develop a framework based on OSGi that can integrate popular home network standards such as UPnP and Jini thereby achieving interoperability within homes. My framework extends OSGi specifications to integrate UPnP and Jini. This framework has been designed with the home network scenario in mind. A Proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented which also demonstrates the integration of low-powered devices such as Pocket PCs and embedded network processors such as TINI devices. |
