An approach to service integration in the OSGi architecture of home networks

The Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi) specification defines a service-oriented framework to allow service applications in a network device to interoperate with each other by sharing resources and to be managed remotely. It is widely applied in home network, car network, etc. However, the mechanism of OSGi services operation is performed in a centralized fashion, which means services published in a local framework are unavailable for other remote frameworks and vice versa. In a word, distributed OSGi services can¿t be shared. To solve this problem, Jini, another java technology for building service-oriented architectures, is employed as a bridge for the connection of distributed OSGi services. A Jini service called `Jini-Bridge¿ is defined. When it is published in an additional OSGi bundle, distributed OSGi users can get remote services, and can publish services not only in local framework but also in remote frameworks. All services in distributed frameworks are shared without any more planning, installation, or human intervention.