A Framework for Interoperability of Heterogeneous Devices in Ubiquitous Home

Ubiquitous home refers not only to home but also to logical space, including a wide range of out-home personal devices such as mobile phones, PDAs, laptops, car navigators, and office PCs. There are certain connection barriers among the devices, such as the dynamic IP address, NAT. In a home network, various devices coexist in heterogeneous networks, such as IP, IEEE1394, PLC, Bluetooth, ZigBee, UWB, and IrDA, all of which lack interoperability due to their different physical transmission characteristics and protocols. In ubiquitous home where an unrestricted collaboration of the devices is essential to offer services that meet the users´ requirements, free interoperability among the devices must be guaranteed. This paper proposes a framework for interoperability of the heterogeneous devices in a ubiquitous home based on a virtual overlay network which hides the complicated physical network configurations and heterogeneity of the service protocols. Compared with conventional approaches, the framework offers improvements in terms of its capacity to support network and device types, its reliability.