A Jini/sup TM/ lookup service for resource-constrained devices

Almost by definition, appliances are useful, cost-effective devices or tools. This holds true for "smart" appliances as well-they must provide a reasonable level of computational and communications capability and be interoperable with other devices in their environment. The issues around interoperability are best solved via standards-based connectivity and communications protocols, such as Jini/sup TM,/ OSGi, UPnP, and others. However, in the case of Jini/sup TM/, the static and runtime storage requirements of typical implementations are too great to be considered for the embedded systems in appliances. PsiNaptic has developed a version of Jini/sup TM/ that is compliant with the Jini specification and requires an order of magnitude less storage than the reference implementation from Sun Microsystems Inc. This article provides a review of Jini/sup TM/ followed by a detailed discussion of PsiNaptic's implementation concentrating on the lookup, discovery, and join protocols. A simple demonstration using an 8051-based Java controller is shown.