Remote mobile control of home appliances

The paper describes an approach for interconnecting home and mobile networks to enable the control of consumer electronics devices (TV, VCR, camera, CD speller, radio, etc.), connected in a home network, from a remote mobile device like a mobile phone or a Web pad. Typical applications are: remote mobile programming of VCR (video cassette recorder), remote mobile control of heating thermostats, remote mobile monitoring of security cameras, etc. To explore the possibilities and the challenges from the middleware point of view, we have developed a general home-mobile network gateway architecture. The feasibility of this architecture has been demonstrated with a prototype implementation, in which we have selected HAVI (home audio video interoperability) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) as home entertainment and mobile communication network technologies respectively.