Objectives

To Design a universal home control system, there are a lot of issues to concern. I simply divide the system into 6 main objectives. The most important objective is to ease the

sufferings of both home appliance manufacturers and remote console manufacturers.

Integration of heterogeneous home control network on the network layer, then add user interface abstraction on those integrated services for the presentation layer. Access control and dependency policy is required. The final is synchronization and notification since there should be different numbers and various kinds of remote consoles on the SUIT system.

1.3.1. Ease the pain for home appliance manufacturer

There are a numbers of network control platform available now. As those manufacturers need to decide which protocols or platforms to use, they are confused at this point because they can’t enlarge the customer populations once they made wrong decision. For example, it doesn’t make any sense to support multiple network protocols or standards for a cheap light bulb. The company will go into bankruptcy if the boss makes the very wrong and stupid decision. SUIT technology helps to face the dilemma.

1.3.2. Ease the pain for remote console manufacturer

SUIT provides the solutions for problems listed below.

a. Various network control platforms.

This point is just the same as in 1.3.1.

b. Specific user interface for specific appliance.

Remote console developers construct user interface for appliances one by one. However it will be a terrible nightmare when a big number of devices appear in a short period. Those programmers have to work day and night for this situation.

On the SUIT platform, developer’s job is the design of pluggable presentation themes, the same idea with desktop themes in Windows XP. In Windows XP you can change themes yourself or even design it. Developers don’t have to worry anything about context because

c. Expected to be standardized but versatile and custom-tailored.

Sometimes standardized and custom-tailored may be a conflict, you have to give up one of the requirement when you accommodate another. If there is a wildly accepted alternative interface access protocol (AIAP) or user interface standard which is custom-tailored capable, then we reach the goal to be standardized and also versatile. SUIT platform follows some INCITs standards as the user interface abstraction description and reach the goal.

1.3.3. Heterogeneous Networks Integration

There are several home control network protocols in the world, including UPnP, Jini, X10, Insteon, ZigBee, Lonworks and so on. Besides those information appliances, what we can’t ignore are traditional appliances, including TV, DVD player, Air conditioning…etc.

These types of traditional home appliance has built-in infrared receiver, and of course, a remote control that transmits infrared.

On the SUIT platform, different home control networks are wrapped as standard bundles and can be recognized by each other, this is the integration of heterogeneous networks. With this property, the following design becomes quite easy.

1.3.4. User Interface Abstraction

As the heterogeneous network device services are standardized, you can find those home control services in the service repository. Only service is not so good enough, we add user interface abstraction on each of the home appliances. Those user interface descriptions can be thought as some suites for a home appliance, we dress them up on the SUIT platform.

With those suites, remote consoles are able to gather information about the home appliance, functions or operations on it, manuals of those operations, presentation hints for construction…etc. Then the remote console automatically generates the user interface with resources instructed in the documents, resources are labels, images, sounds and so on. The

advantage of constructing the user interface with resource indicated in the documents is flexible. You can design multi-language labels for an appliance, so that tourist can simply replace those documents and make the device friendly, which shows the language he speaks.

This objective is really important on the SUIT platform, developers or usual users can do a lot of applications on it, not just multi-language.

1.3.5. Access Control and Dependency Policy

Universal home domination is really helpful and powerful when you want to control some thing in your house. But universal power leads to disaster when you don’t mean to control something, or someone you don’t trust dominates your home. Access control achieves authentication and authorization. For authentication, users need to enter user id and password when they login the SUIT gateway. For authorization, during the process of generating user interface to people, the system will check user’s profile then generates the proper user interface for him, for those operations the user is not allowed to do, he can’t find the operation through the generated user interface.

Dependency policy defines execution conditions for certain operation. For example, when you want to reset a device, a notification pops up, and waits for you to press “OK” as an acknowledgement, the sequence of operations have to be defined by dependency policy. The purpose of this objective is to avoid SUIT gateway going into a maze state.

1.3.6. Synchronization

Information about current appliance status must be synchronized on each of remote consoles. For example, a family is watching TV together. In this scenario, every one in the family holds some types of universal remote console. Once the father switches the channel, status of the TV on each remote console should be changed, this is synchronization.