xAAL: A Distributed Infrastructure for Heterogeneous Ambient Devices

Abstract

International audienceAmbient assisted living systems are based on sensors and actuators, with a diversity of network protocols and vendors. This commonly leads to the introduction of gateways or middlewares into the technical infrastructure in order to address interoperability issues. The xAAL framework presented in this paper aims to provide interoperability and to redesign such "gateways" into well-defined functional entities communicating with each other via a lightweight message bus over IP. Each entity may have multiple instances, may be shared between several boxes, and may be physically located in any box. Thanks to the distributed architecture of the system, each home automation vendor may peacefully provide its own xAAL box without revealing details of its technology. Also, several applications may be plugged together on the xAAL bus without getting bored with underlying heterogeneity. Moreover, the management of the dynamicity allows sensors or applications to enter and leave the system at any time

System Design for Coordinated Multi-robot Assistance Deployment in Smart Spaces

“…Moreover, those boxes embed additional functions to make all of these usable: HMI (via Web and/or smartphones), configuration facilities, connectors to extra services in the cloud, etc. In previous work, Lohr et al [15] presented a review of existing solutions that prove highly centralized and partial from the interoperability point of view, as each box manages a limited number of lowlevel protocols and boxes are hardly able to talk to each other.…”

“…The xAAL Interoperability Protocol: To alleviate the aforementioned limitations, we have proposed the xAAL system [15] (see Fig. 3) whose foundation is to reorganize and formalize the architectures of those boxes, which are in fact all composed of the same functionalities.…”

A Transparent home Sensors/Actuators layer for Health &Well-being services

“…We defined the following environmental variables: thermal comfort (temperature and humidity), noise quality and light quality. To achieve the UCA, a transparent sensors/actuators layer using xAAL [11] has been proposed to fight interoperability issues in the home automation domain. xAAL allows to seamlessly integrate TAN/BAN/PAN/LAN devices from different protocols.…”

“…xAAL [11,12] is an open-source distributed infrastructure for heterogeneous ambient devices. The communication between devices is realized by a lightweight event-based messaging protocol working on the so-called xAAL bus.…”

A Transparent Home Sensors/Actuators Layer for Health and Well-Being Services

“…We defined the following environmental variables: thermal comfort (temperature and humidity), noise quality, light quality. To achieve the UCA, a transparent sensors/actuators layer using xAAL [12] has been proposed to fight interoperability issues in the home automation domain. xAAL allows to seamlessly integrate TAN/BAN/PAN/LAN devices from different protocols.…”