Reliable and Swift Device Discovery in Consolidated IP and ZigBee Home Networks

This paper proposes a device discovery method for consolidated IP and ZigBee home networks. The method broadcasts an IP multicasted device discovery request of UPnP, m-search, in the ZigBee network as a Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) message. Upon receiving the m-search broadcast, ZigBee devices respond after a constant time delay with their device description Universal Resource Name (URN). We refer to this device discovery mechanism as transparent m-search. Transparent m-search enables reliable and swift device discovery in home networks which may include constrained networks such as ZigBee. It is revealed by an experiment with 41 ZigBee devices that the delayed response from ZigBee devices is essential to avoid collisions between m-search broadcast and responses from devices and, as a result, to secure the reliability of device discovery. Since the transparent m-search requires the receiving ZigBee devices to respond with their device description URNs, the execution time of device discovery is significantly improved. In our experiment with 41 ZigBee devices, a conventional msearch took 38.1 second to complete device discovery while that of transparent m-search took only 6.3 second. key words: UPnP, ZigBee, Device discovery, HTTP