A Multi-Middleware Bridge for Dynamic Extensibility and Load Balancing in Home Network Environments

Abstract

For implementing the ubiquitous computing environments with smart home infrastructures, various research on the home network have been performed by several research institutes and companies. Due to the various home network middleware that are developed recently, the standardization of the home network middleware is being delayed and it calls for the middleware bridge which solves the interoperability problem among the heterogeneous middlewares. Now the research on the scheme for interoperability and the development of the various bridges are in progress, such as one-to-one bridge supporting interoperability between two middlewares and one-to-many bridge supporting interoperability among the multi-middlewares. However, existing systems and schemes does not consider the dynamic extensibility and performance that is particularly needed in the smart home environments. The middleware bridge should provide bridge extensibility with zero-configuration for non-expert users. It should also provide the load balancing scheme for efficient and proper traffic distribution. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Middleware Bridge(MMB) for dynamic extensibility and load balancing in home network environments. MMB provides bridge scalability and load balancing through the distributed system structure. We also verify the features such as interoperability, bridge extensibility, and the performance of the load balancing algorithm.