A virtual overlay network for integrating home appliances

Various home appliances and personal appliances are expected to be connected to the Internet in the near future. However, the conventional IP protocol is not expected to be sufficient for connecting these appliances without protocol translation. Since adding new functionalities to the IP protocol is too generic for most applications, we believe that future networks should be customized according to the characteristics of the respective applications. We propose a virtual overlay network for integrating networked home appliances. Virtual overlay networks enable new application-specific networks to be built on existing networks. The proposed virtual overlay network is designed to access a variety of appliances on home networks from personal or home appliances on other home networks. The paper describes the motivation of our work, and the design and the current status of the proposed virtual overlay network. We think that the approach proposed will also be useful for building virtual overlay networks for other applications such as continuous media streaming or peer-to-peer storage systems.