Habitat: A DDS-based service framework for smart spaces

Smart spaces are ordinary environments where people and facilities can interact. The nature of this domain gives rise to some important issues which must be considered such as the integration of heterogeneous facilities, the need to dynamically change the number of participants, transient behavior, peer-to-peer interactions and quality of service needs. All these issues increase both the cost and difficulty of developing applications for smart environments. This paper presents Habitat, a framework for developing service-oriented and event-driven applications for smart home spaces. The framework is based on standard technologies such as DDS, XMPP or IDL-based definition of data structures. It is composed of a collection of standard participants that typically interact in home environments. Application developers only have to instantiate these standard participants at runtime to allow home devices to offer their services in the Habitat global service and data space, where users and other participants request them.