An adaptive network architecture for home- and building environments

Fieldbus networks have significantly improved flexibility and management in classic building automation domains. However, the costs of such installations are still greatly affected by the commissioning efforts needed to bring them up and running. The dedicated cabling, initial engineering efforts and sophisticated binding and configuration tools often prevent home owners from investing in such networks. On the other side, many electronic devices from other domains have found their way into home- and building environments. And with IT equipment TCP/IP connectivity and ldquozero configrdquo protocols were introduced. There is the vision of an intelligent home/building with one integrated network in which all devices work together seamlessly. It may positively influence factors such as energy efficiency, usability, flexibility, security and comfort. This paper proposes an Internet protocol based architecture thought to build up such a network. The result is a distributed, scalable hard- and software infrastructure that adapts to the context of use and comes up with goal-centric services provided by the numerous underlying devices. It allows standard mobile clients to act as remote controls with dynamic user interfaces generated on the fly. This text explores the different building blocks that make up the architecture and presents results derived from a first prototype.