Autonomic Computing
Device and service discovery in home networks with OSGi
IEEE Communications Magazine
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This paper presents the design and implementation of a simple and elegant middleware architecture providing virtual sensors as representatives for any type of physical sensors. With our middleware, external applications can seamlessly discover sensor-hosted services through Zeroconf and it provides a standardized communication interface that applications can use without having to deal with sensor-specific details. The limited capabilities of most types of sensors prevent the inclusion of a full communication stack with IP addressing. Yet, through the use of virtual sensors, a uniform communication interface based on UDP/TCP sockets can be exposed to external applications. This will significantly simplify application development for integrated services involving multiple types of sensors. For evaluation and testing purposes we present a simple demonstration using SUN SPOT sensor devices connected to a laptop computer through a gateway device. The demonstration shows how the Zeroconf protocol can be used to automatically discover services hosted by a multitude of devices in the home, how to establish networking between the devices, and present the services in a browser window.