Networking in a smart home — Providing lightweight networking services for heterogeneous devices

Interoperability is a highly valued concept in providing services to a smart home environment. Presenting a consistent, seamless interface to the user requires individual devices within the smart home be able to communicate with each other. This in turn indicates the necessity for common standards and means of information interchange and at times even remote method invocation between heterogeneous smart devices available in the home. Within this paper, we present our implementation of network communication services and a higher level protocol for use in a smart home. Specifically, we concentrate on provision of network services as a supplement to the natural language engine component of the Amadeus UDA (Ubiquitous Digital Agents) project. The end product of this work is the capability for completely unrelated devices for instance, a smart refrigerator and an intelligent personal video recording device to be able to communicate autonomously and provide the user with the means to query and operate devices remotely across the network.