Home Appliances

In this section, we will introduce the existing home appliances technologies in our daily live, including both information appliances and traditional appliances. Eventually, you can figure out how a maze environment we are living, there are so many networks and protocols.

2.1.1. IR Technology

What is the most frequent action we do in living room? Maybe you will say watching TV.

Yes, this is a good answer. But what do we need to do for watching TV? The answer is obviously to press the button on the TV remote control. TV is embedded with an IR receiver and the remote control is the IR transmitter. Once the IR transmits a correct IR code into the air, TV will act correctly as the remote control says.

The examples of same infrastructure are Air conditioning, surveillance for home or for car, rolling door…etc. Even a robot toy for child uses IR technology. So it seems IR technology is every where in our live.

2.1.2. Powerline Technology

Powerline technology is the basic mechanism for home control, and has been used from nineteen centuries when electricity was invented. We put button on the wall for controlling

any kind of lights in our houses. Apparently, we don’t expect to have any remote control or console according to out habits, what we need to do is, stand up, walk to the button, press the button and so on.

2.1.3. X10 and INSTEON Technology

For X0 home control scenario two components are required, they are X10 module and X10 control. Traditionally, we connect the power plug of an electronic device to the outlet some where in the house.

Now with X10 technology, instead of directly connecting straightly to the outlet, we connect it with X10 module and X10 module to outlet. At the control part, we have X10 control connected to computer. The computer is able to send signals through serial port or USB port for controlling the appliance. The signal will start from X10 control with the computer, then goes into the powerline infrastructure of the building. Finally some X10 modules with some appliances are notified by the signal, then the appliances are under control of the software hosts on the computer.

Actually X10 is an old technology which already exists for 30 years. It is the time for new technology to beat X10. INSTEON is an integrated dual-mesh network that combines wireless radio frequency (RF) with the powerline. INSTEON improves reliability by providing a backup system by wireless communication technology. One thing very different from X10 is that, each device acts as a two way repeater.

INSTEON is also compatible with X10 devices. Homeowners with existing X10 networks can migrate to an INSTEON network without throwing away the old X10 device.

This must be a big inducement to people who have dreams to realize smart home.

2.1.4. Lonworks Technology

Lonworks is a home control protocol built on low bandwidth which is created by Echelon. The platform is for networking devices over media such as twisted pair, powerlines, fiber optics, and RF…etc. It is popular now very popular in the industry.

Thousands of companies nowadays have built products or applications on Lonworks platform, performing functions as embedded machine control, highway street lighting, heating and air conditioning systems, intelligent electricity metering, subway train control, stadium lighting and speaker control, security systems, fire detection and suppression, and newborn location monitoring and alarming.

2.1.5. Jini Network Technology

Jini is a network architecture for the construction of distributed systems where scale, rate of change and complexity of interactions within and between networks are extremely important and cannot be satisfactorily addressed by existing technologies. Jini technology provides a flexible infrastructure for delivering services in a network and for creating spontaneous interactions between clients that use these services regardless of their hardware or software implementations.

Jini network technology is an open architecture that enables developers to create network-centric services -- whether implemented in hardware or software -- that are highly adaptive to change. Jini technology can be used to build adaptive networks that are scalable, evolvable and flexible as typically required in dynamic computing environments. There are three main features of Jini technology, it supports Plug-and-Play mechanism for network service, provides toolkit for developers to build strong distributed systems and the

discovery, join and lookup. For more details about related protocols, please reference to Jini.org, a central place and resource for the Jini Community.

2.1.6. UPnP Technology

The UPnP architecture created by Microsoft offers pervasive peer-to-peer network connectivity of PCs, intelligent appliances, and wireless devices. The UPnP architecture is a distributed, open networking architecture that uses TCP/IP and http to enable seamless proximity networking in addition to control and data transfer among networked devices in the home, office, and everywhere in between.

The most significant difference between UPnP and JINI is that instead of Lookup Service, every client communicates with the service provider directly. Additionally, UPnP technology uses services with remote procedure call, while clients on JINI platform execute services through proxy objects.

Start with Discovery phase, the service provider (device) broadcasts messages, which include the information of the services, such as device name, manufacturer, and etc, just like WSDL in web services. The Description is expressed in standard XML language. Another way for Discovery is that the client sends message for searching services and wait for service provider to response with information of the services.

The next step is controlling the UPnP device. Based on Description, control messages are used to execute actions. Control messages are also expressed in XML using the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). In response to the control message, the service returns any action-specific values. These two steps form complete function calls.

The rest two UPnP features are Notification and Presentation. Notification is event-driven mechanism. Service provider publishes updates and control point subscribes the updates. For Presentation, if a device has a URL for presentation, then the control point can retrieve a page from this URL and present it to users.