The HomePort System

Residential gateways for home automation are prerequisites to obtain optimal exploitation of energy resources, and they also have the potential to provide a unified operation of various home devices and appliances. Although a number of protocol standards have been proposed, the number of commercially available systems is still very limited. One reason for this is the diversity of device manufacturing standards; another is the lack of efficient and expressive middleware for defining control algorithms and usage scenarios. In this paper we present the architectural design of a distributed middleware system for residential gateways including a simple composition language. Also, we present the initial experiences obtained from a prototype implementation of the system.