A Context Aware Connected Home Platform for Pervasive Applications

Context-aware systems are an emerging genre of computer systems that help add some forms of intelligence to our surroundings. The ATRACO project uses the ambient ecology metaphor to conceptualize a space populated by connected devices and services that are interrelated with each other, the environment and the people, supporting the users' everyday activities in a meaningful way. Everyday appliances, devices, and context aware artifacts are part of the ATRACO ambient ecologies. In this paper we present the connected home platform adopted by ATRACO and its evolution to provide network adaptation and context-aware services. A flexible and distributed context-aware service model is introduced using the OSGi and UPnP frameworks. UPnP is used to converge the existing network infrastructure comprising of heterogeneous technologies and protocols at the IP level. Furthermore, we introduce a context-aware service model and provide paradigms of context aware services that build upon perceptual and context aware components of the platform.