The Bridge Component for UPnP and Bluetooth for a Wearable Computing Environment

Home networks in the future will be complex systems of the BANs (body area networks) and the PANs (personal area networks), and will be composed of various wireless devices. Therefore, the self-discovery protocols that serve to control and maintain these devices are crucial. This paper proposes a bridge service that extends the capacity of widely used and IP based UPnP discovery protocol to a non-IP wireless device (Bluetooth). The bridge service has been implemented in an NPnP middleware component for a wearable computing environment in the BAN.