Intelligent Home Networking

Project Goal: To develop a distributed middleware architecture to allow applications and devices to seamlessly interoperate with one another regardless of the underlying communication technology, creating an automated home with service discovery facilities.

Project Description: A Home Networking system is comprised by devices and appliances which, if interconnected, provide an intelligent environment with increased awareness and functionality.

An intelligent home can include simple, easy-to-install sensors or a complex central system that combines media/entertainment, home automation, security, telecom and computing. However, a number of questions arise: which physical mediums to choose to interconnect devices, which communication protocols to use to exchange information between devices, how to intuitively interface with the home system, and how to locate and identify users.

The middleware under development will address all these issues and prove its usefulness in an environment dealing with a multitude of devices (e.g.: linux-based routers and set-top boxes, general purpose computers and sensors) and a variety of technologies (e.g.: Ethernet, Bluetooth and X10).

Additionally, the middleware provides developers a way to create and publish services in a standardized fashion, by means of an application programming interface (API).

The picture that follows describes the physical environment where the middleware will be tested.

Active Period: 2007-2009

Current status: Service discovery and event subscription has been successfully tested. The framework is currently supported on S60-enabled phones and windows/linux platforms running python 2.2. A user manual is being written to aid developers in building services and service consumers.

Project Funding: LEMe

GEMS team: Pedro Rebelo

Additional Resources: RTCM Presentation