Heterogeneous device discovery framework for the Smart Homes

Abstract

The future home will be pervaded by mobile and stationary devices which need to dynamically connect and coordinate in order to seamlessly help people in accomplishing their tasks. However, for this vision to become a reality, it is important for researcher and developer to build applications that constantly adapt and integrate heterogeneous devices supported by different communication technologies. Bluetooth efficiently fits in the home environment: the range of communication it provides sufficient for Smart Homes applications consisting of a large number of resource-constraint devices. In this paper, we present a Pervasive Discovery Framework for Smart Homes, and an implementation currently supporting the Bluetooth and UPnP device discovery. The framework is based on robust technologies such as the UPnP protocol and the Java based OSGi bundles.