An Intelligent Networking and Automation System for Home and SOHO Environments

The ever increasing desires for improvement in efficiency and comfort for individuals’ home and office environments have provided the driving force for the recent development in Home/SOHO automation and networking systems. This paper presents a new Home/SOHO automation system which is designed for handling heterogeneous network systems. The laboratory-built system makes use of OSGi (Open Service Gateway Initiative) open standard to provide a flexible framework for adding and removing devices and appliances in an ad hoc manner. Since end users of the system may not necessarily be very computer literate, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) open standard is being used to make the network connection of various devices as transparent to the users as possible. The current experimental Home/SOHO system can support Bluetooth wireless network, Lonworks, IR, C-bus, 315MHz, 418MHz and 433MHz ISM band RF, and broadband Internet communication. The proposed system can certainly provide a platform for developing Home/SOHO commercial products and it is also flexible enough for developing and experimenting with other Home/SOHO automation technologies