Interoperability among Heterogeneous Systems in Smart Home Environment

The smart home environment is highly characterized by heterogeneity with many systems that need to interoperate and perform their tasks efficiently. With rapid growth of services, applications and devices in smart home environment, the interoperability factor seems still elusive. This is due to the nature of smart home as distributed architecture that needs certain degree of interoperability and interoperation for managing heterogeneous systems comprising of different platforms. These heterogeneous systems are developed in isolation and consist of different operating systems, different programming platform and different tier of services. There is need for a mechanism that could make the heterogeneous systems `talk¿ each other and interoperate in an efficient manner regardless of operating platform. Web services seems to be state-of-the art technology that could be one potential solution in providing greater interoperability. In this paper we describe interoperability issues that need to be considered and we present a solution based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) technology to solve the interoperability problem in smart home environment.