The HomePort System

Abstract

Abstract-Residential gateways for home automation are prerequisites to obtain optimal exploitation of energy resources, and they also have the potential to provide a unified operation of various home devices and appliances. Although a number of protocol standards have been proposed, the number of commercially available systems are still very limited. One reason for this is the diversity of device manufacturing standards, another is the lack of efficient and expressive middleware for defining control algorithms and usage scenarios. In this paper we present the architectural design of a distributed middleware system for residential gateways including a simple composition language. Also, we present the initial experiences obtained from a prototype implementation of the system.

xAAL: A Distributed Infrastructure for Heterogeneous Ambient Devices

“…Thus, the box provider should provide everything by itself, or should ask (beg) third parties to offer components for its box, based on strong specifications of means to plug such add-ons. Brønsted et al [7] noticed that "with an approach using a central server, it is more difficult to obtain a balanced business relationship between market actors since one actor is likely gain dominance over the server. "…”

The ENCOURAGE ICT architecture for heterogeneous smart grids

“…The communication between the HAN GWs and the ENCOURAGE Platform are mediated by ENCOURAGE Middleware Plugins (MPGs), and can be transported using different protocols. If they want to access the existing MPG, HAN GW manufacturers can add a module to their gateway that translates the home/building automation protocols of the HAN devices into the EACS (Energy Automation and Control System) protocol, originally developed in the Homeport project [8] and now adopted as a building block of ENCOURAGE. An alternative for the manufacturers is to implement a MPG for their custom protocol.…”

HomePort: Middleware for heterogeneous home automation networks

“…Overall we can say that implementation of adapters went smoothly. Note that the HomePort repository 1 provides developers with code examples in order to help them develop their own adapters.…”

“…In the following we present re-design and implementation of the HomePort middleware which was presented conceptually in [1]. Their HomePort enabled intercommunication between devices belonging to different sub-networks through a bridging layer.…”

“…• implementation of REST interfaces for home automation applications, • security and confidentiality resolved through standard web-protocols, and • an integrated tracing service that forms the basis for resolving accountability issues. The architecture is implemented and tested and is now available as open source software for Linux platforms 1 .…”