Seamless Integration of Heterogeneous Devices and Access Control in Smart Homes

Abstract

Abstract-The recent trend of ubiquitous access to embedded physical devices over the Internet as well as increasing penetration of wireless protocols such as ZigBee has raised attention to smart homes. These systems consist of sensors, devices and smart appliances that can be monitored and controlled remotely by human users and cloud services. However, the lack of a de facto communication standard for smart homes creates a barrier against the interoperability of devices from different vendors. We address this challenge by proposing a holistic, extensible software architecture that seamlessly integrates heterogeneous protocol-and vendor-specific devices and services, while making these services securely available over the Internet. Our architecture is developed on top of the OSGi framework and incorporates a semantic model of a smart home system. As a result, we achieve semantic interoperability -the ability to integrate new applications and drivers into the deployed system during runtime. Furthermore, we integrate a new access control model for specific smart home scenarios. As a proof of our concept, we demonstrate the seamless semantic discovery of home devices at runtime by integrating several protocols including X10, Insteon, ZigBee and UPnP into a real test. Using smart phones and cloud services together with our home gateway implementation, we further demonstrate the ease of integration of new applications and drivers.

XSACd—Cross-domain resource sharing & access control for smart environments

“…Kim et al [19] have proposed the use of an OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) -based framework to integrate heterogeneous smart-home devices and services. The proposed framework also includes an access control model, combining the XACML mechanisms with OSGi services to appropriately create the queries that will be forwarded to the entity responsible for access control decisions (i.e.…”

Towards the Evolution of Smart Home Environments: A Survey

“…Considering a system capable of interacting with several of these devices and standards considerably increases the complexity of the system. Several researchers have worked on this problem [18], bringing solutions via M2M (Machine-to-Machine) and OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative). Still, this is a hot topic in the field.…”

A Smart Energy System with Distributed Access Control

“…One thing all of these protocols have in common is that, despite mesh networking capabilities, they fall short of access control between peers, and their access control schemes are limited to the central controller [6]. None of them are directly compatible with smartmobiles, and all require either a gateway [7] or a dongle.…”