Middleware Solutions for Home Networking

Abstract

``Home networking'' has emerged on the IT scene just a few years ago but suddenly became one of the most heavily used buzzwords in these days. High speed internet accessibility is already an important part of residential services. Nonetheless, home networking has not been successfully serviced in practice, largely due to the existence of diverse standards in networking technologies, and to lack of software technology that can effectively deal with the barriers.

Middleware is used to isolate application programs from the details of the underlying hardware and network components and provide a set of system interfaces to their functions. In the world of home networking, we encounter many types of hardware devices from different manufactures and information service providers. To provide interoperability between these diverse systems, a number of home networking middleware applications have evolved. In this talk, I will introduce two notable solutions, Jini and OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative), and how they can be used as viable approaches in this continously evolving home networking environment.