AOLOA: A Composable Framework for Third-Party Applications for Smart Home Gateways

In the last few years, the amount of smart devices in domestic environments has incredibly increased. Nowadays, a smart home is usually managed via a gateway offering value-added applications by connecting devices to the cloud. Every new device comes with its own features and protocols or cloud services. There is, consequently, a strong need for constantly modifying the gateway´s behavior by deploying, removing or updating applications. However, there is no software architecture ensuring enough flexibility and trust to sustain this need. We consequently propose in this article a framework that allows to easily compose modular and context-aware software architectures intending to host third-party applications. This framework - called AOLOA (Another OSGi-Like On Another) - is based on OSGi and Java permissions. It ensures applications isolation, separates business-logic (higher level) and platform (lower level) layers and allows their trusted management.