Design and implementation of distributed object-oriented infrastructures for networked home appliances on commodity operating systems

We describe our ongoing work to build object-oriented distributed middleware for networked home appliances, which are executed on commodity operating systems. The current prototype has adopted HAVi (Home Audio/Video Interoperability) as distributed middleware for home appliances. We have implemented HAVi in Java, and have adopted Linux as an operating system. Since Java and Linux are running on a variety of platforms, our software can be ported to a target system without modification. Therefore, it becomes easy to develop a new application on a standard PC platform. The paper describes the design issues and the implementation of our system. We have actually implemented several programs that emulate home appliances such as a digital television. We also present some experiences with the current prototype.