OHAS: Open home automation system

This paper describes a vision of an open home automation system consisting of products from many diverse vendors. Plurality is important to ensure innovation through a mix of competition and cooperation between market actors. Supporting such a system, this paper proposes an open framework for integrating new products with existing home automation equipment consisting of two parts: An upgradeable heterogeneous network infrastructure and a method for describing embedded devices. The infrastructure consists of a scalable distributed gateway architecture that provides data communication between different types of network. Using generic communication modules, that encapsulate communication technology, the infrastructure and legacy products can be upgraded to take advantage of the latest data-communication technologies. To enable services and allow semi-automatic system configuration, devices entering the framework must provide a device descriptor written in a device description language comprising a syntactic interface description part and a semantic description part. Using natural language components vendors can now describe new innovative features that are not yet supported in any standard. A concept prototype using a number of different wireless technologies has successfully shown that is it possible to control devices with no prior application protocol knowledge using components from natural language as common language for translation.