An Extensible Application Platform for Heterogeneous Smart Home Appliances and Mobile Devices

Nowadays, various kinds of smart home appliances are widely deployed in our daily life. These embedded, networked, and programmable appliances could be accessed through various methods, but may not be integrated together due to the different kinds of home network protocols on which these appliances are deployed. On the other hand, with the penetration of mobile devices, people could leverage these appliances by fingers from anywhere around the world. However, the mobile accesses to these appliances are usually proprietary and require complicated development efforts. The paper aims at developing an application platform prototype named HomeBox for home appliances and mobile devices. The platform provides connectivity for heterogeneous smart home appliances, hosts an application runtime environment for smart home applications, and provides user interface transparency for mobile-devices to reduce the development efforts. The prototype has been explored in various applications to manage smart home appliances from mobile devices and demonstrate the extensibility for future devices and architectures. Key-Words: mobile computing, smart home appliances, home network, OSGi framework, XUL, X10, UPnP