New architecture of realizing seamless connectivity and cooperative control for home network systems

This paper proposes a new home network architecture for realizing flexible scalability and seamless connectivity and cooperative control. In a home, there are devices which have varying processing power so these devices may support different protocols. They are required to be able to be controlled seamlessly regardless of the protocol. By controlling these devices, cooperative control is desired. A home network system is also required to be able to configure the system scale according to the user´s needs. This architecture makes it possible to provide seamless connectivity by protocol translation and to control devices cooperatively by managing rules in a home server. It also supports flexible scalability, with a new discovery mechanism, from a small-scale system without a home server, to a large-scale system with a home server. We developed and confirmed a prototype system using this architecture.