HOUSe-KEEPER, A Vendor-independent Architecture for Easy Management of Smart Homes

i Declaration I, the undersigned, declare that the work described in this dissertation is, except where otherwise stated, entirely my own work and has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university. The 14 th of September 2001 iii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank my family for their support and patience in completing this dissertation. Also, I would like to thank my supervisor, Mr. Alexis Donnelly, for the advice and comments that I received. Thanks to the European Union. Finally, many thanks to those who helped me. iv Abstract Home-networking is gaining momentum. In a couple of months, Windows XP will be launched with the connected home experience as one of its core areas of interest. In the medium term at least, there will be more than one home networking " middleware " in a smart home, a home populated with smart, e.g., Web-enabled or network-enabled, devices. Nevertheless, the home system will have to present a global and complete view of smart devices in the home without excluding devices from one or more different high-level home networking technologies. HOUSeKEEPER proposes an open architecture into which home networking " middleware " can be " plugged ". In addition to being independent of the underlying high-level home networking technologies, it provides a means to monitor and control smart devices remotely over the Internet, as well as to easily grant access control and add some context information to them. These features are still in development for the two main high-level home networking technologies, Jini and UPnP. Moreover, HOUSeKEEPER offers a real prototype of a smart home network accessible from the Internet for residential end-users. A lamp can be switched on from a Web page or the kettle for coffee water can be turned on from a WAP phone. The prototype demonstrates how it is possible to address the requirements of a smart home system thanks to the HOUSeKEEPER architecture. The beginning of this document presents the domain of home-networking and its state of the art review. Then, the HOUSeKEEPER architecture is described. Finally, there is an analysis of what has been achieved and what has been brought to light.

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