Controlling Home Appliances through UPnP

1. Controlling Home Appliances through UPnP Damien Porter • Home networking was until recently viewed only as a means of linking home computers together for file sharing • New advances in smart device technology are causing this view to be revised by developers and users alike. • Some of the old problems that prevent home networking from becoming as popular as it could still apply however such as device incompatibility and difficult set up . • A group of companies and developers are coming together to define UPnP, a standard that will hopefully resolve these issues. A simple home network controlling internal lighting Thermometer • Universal Plug and Play is a standard which takes the no set up plug and play approach to computing and attempts to apply it to any device which may be integrated into a home network. This offers several advantages: • No difficult set up, just attach device and let it get started • Devices locate resources on network automatically and monitor them for updates. • This is an open standard that all companies can meet, so incompatibility problems could be lessened if not eliminated. • All devices in the home may be monitored and controlled from the PCs in the house as they are all integrated. PC Control point Heater Control point Air Conditioner Devices are containers of services, and communicate through one or more Control Points in order to interact when services are called, larger more complex devices sometimes act as Control Points themselves • For my project I am implementing virtual representations of UPnP devices that offer all the services and interactions of a real device of the same type. This should allow people to see and understand some of the potential interaction problems in UPnP before such devices are widespread allowing service incompatibilities to be resolved or at least considered prior to them having a large impact on systems. In order to do this I am writing these devices in Java using the eclipse environment and interacting using pre-existing control points for actual UPnP devices. • These interaction problems generally only appear where 2 or more devices share an interest in the function of a third device and give it contradictory instructions • There are multiple possibilities for resolving this issue but I feel that one based on a overall service priority system that rates the functions of the network, such as security, comfort and entertainment according to importance, allowing more vital services to override lesser ones but not the other way round is a viable and practical solution