A framework to access networked appliances in wide area networks

The rapid evolution and expansion of networked appliances raises an interesting problem of communicating with these devices through the Internet from remote locations. The wide acceptance and popularity of session initiation protocol (SlP) for device-to-device communication makes SIP a candidate protocol to remotely establish communication with network attached devices and control them through the Internet. This paper addresses the problem of accessing networked appliances' operating status and profile information from a remote location in the Internet and addresses the issue of interoperability among different device vendors and service providers. Device operational status and profile information are particularly important to networked appliances where a user agent would like to monitor the state of networked appliances from a remote location and be notified about changes of device status. In this paper we propose a SIP-based framework that exploits SIP's event notification mechanisms to exchange device operational status and profile information. We also define an XML-based format for device profiles, which forms a basis for exchanging device status information.