Design and Evaluation of the Home Network Systems Using the Service Oriented Architecture

In the conventional home network systems (HNS), a powerful centralized server controls all electric home appliances connected to provide value-added integrated services. However, when the number of the appliances increases and the appliances become more sophisticated, the conventional architecture would suffer from problems in superfluous resources, flexibility, scalability and reliability. This paper proposes alternative architecture for HNS, which exploits the service-oriented architecture with Web Services. In the proposed architecture, each appliance is controlled by a Web service in a de-centralized manner. Then, the services autonomously collaborate with each other to achieve the integrated service scenarios. To evaluate the HNS at the design process, we also present four kinds of evaluation metrics: reliability, load, complexity, and coupling. Using these metrics, we conduct a comparative study among the proposed and the previous HNS architectures.