Implementing Multi-Vendor Home Network System with Vendor-Neutral Services and Dynamic Service Binding

The home network system (HNS) consists of networked household appliances, intended to provide value-added services. The conventional HNS has been built on the single- vendor system, which severely limits potential of the HNS. To overcome the problem, this paper presents a method that constructs the HNS with multi-vendor appliances. The proposed method first defines vendor-neutral standard services, with which various HNS applications and services are developed. Then, we exploit a dynamic service binding mechanism, which binds each standard service on a vendor- specific API of an appliance during run-time. With this mechanism, common HNS applications and services can be achieved by various combinations of multi-vendor appliances. Moreover, replacing any appliance with another never affects the execution of the applications. We have implemented the proposed method using Apache Axis Web services and Rhino JavaScript engine. The experimental evaluation showed that our implementation works well for a practical HNS with sufficiently small overhead.