Open Home Networks: The TEAHA Approach

The current trend for home appliances is networking. Although more and more of these appliances are networked, there is not a standard way of interaction, which restrains the development of services for in-home networks. The lack of standardisation is partly due to a legacy of business interests; white goods, audio video equipment, security, and personal digital appliances all have a different background and have different business models. Rather than profound standardisation we propose secure seamless interworking of technologies, applications, and business interests. In this paper we present an architecture which is embedded in legacy technology. Our approach combines known design patterns, augments existing technology, and facilitates so-called business clusters. Further, we discuss a prototype implementation that integrates as an example OSGl, ZigBee, and UPnP technology with CECED (white goods) business interests. The work reported in this paper has been executed in an international industrial project1: TEAHA.