Towards the UPnP-UP: Enabling User Profile to Support Customized Services in UPnP Networks

In a nutshell, UPnP aims to enable simple and robust connectivity among consumer electronics, intelligent appliances and mobile devices from many different vendors. Nowadays, it is getting an increasing popularity due to its robust way of connecting devices and the massive number of already developed applications, complementing the useful new era of pervasive computing. Although UPnP is an easy-to-use solution for discovery, which allows controlled devices to share and access users contents, it does neither provide user authentication nor authorization mechanisms, requirements that would require user´s data on personal profiles. As a consequence, we propose an extension of the UPnP protocol called UPnP-UP, which allows user authentication and authorization for UPnP devices and applications. The primary goal of our proposed extension is to modify the current UPnP specification as less as possible, maintaining backwards compatibility with previous versions of the protocol. Furthermore, we present our efforts on the development of a UPnP framework for publishing and accessing multimedia contents in order to support this extension as a case of study.