Managing Distributed Networked Appliances in Home Networks

Abstract

Recent years have seen an exponential growth in the use of home networks, from the Internet-enabled PC to network-enabled home appliances. Ordinary and everyday appliances used in the home will increasingly become integral components of these networks. They are required to join, leave, and self-configure in accordance with their dynamic environment. New platforms and applications are needed to mediate interactions between devices to overcome the inherent problems, limitations, and costs of bespoke solutions. While combining our disparate devices to meet future needs is challenging, it will also allow for better exploitation of networked devices to provide obvious benefits to the consumer. A number of approaches and technologies that attempt to redress this issue exist; however, they are not without their own disadvantages. This paper discusses these technologies and introduces some of the novel approaches that have been proposed to address the issue of device autoconfiguration using peer-to-peer technologies. In this way, disparate devices are able to achieve self-management without user interaction. A case study is also presented to illuminate these approaches and demonstrate the applicability of our approach.