Middlewares for Home Monitoring and Control

Our home today is a place where more and more digital devices meet. Those devices not only satisfy the user’s needs but also cooperate with other equipments independently to provide intelligent services for people living inside the house. However, in such environment with many appliances from different manufactures, it may not be straightforward to interconnect all the devices. What is required is common middleware. The problem is that we do not have just one but many kinds of middleware (e.g., Jini, UPnP, oBix) whose domains are distinct or overlap each other. This paper investigates the role and common characteristics of home automation middleware, focusing on current key middlewares which are suitable for home network monitoring and control. Options for building middleware for home networks are also discussed in form of a comparison.