A Secure Gateway Service for Accessing Networked Appliances

Currently there are a range of digital devices and the trend is moving us closer to an increasingly interconnected world. However one of the current limitations is that device usage is location dependent. For example, when you are in your home environment and your PDA, which contains MP3s, resides in your work environment, there is no mechanism to enable you to use the functionality it provides. Mechanisms need to be developed that enable devices to be used irrespective of where you or your device resides. The challenge is to create a gateway that seamlessly integrates devices from different locations. In order to achieve this several issues need to be addressed, which include Quality of Service (QoS), device capability matching, device presence management and secure connectivity in ad hoc and structured networks. We present a scenario to demonstrate our architecture showing how it can help in arranging daily home visit jobs such as engineer visits, receiving postal deliveries and so on, enabling the user to communicate with an engineer or postman while they are away from home.