Heterogeneous Residential Gateway Design Using OSGi : With multi-user and multi-service capabilities

Sammanfattning: As a result of developments, domestic usage of smart appliances by homeowners is increasing drastically. Clustering these appliances together and making them function as an efficient system defines a new place to live or new way of living called a “smart home”. While a smart home provides comfort to homeowners, realizing a smart home involves many technical and business oriented hurdles to be crossed. The primary goal of this thesis work is to design and evaluate the design of a residential gateway. This gateway should be designed as a standardized, secure, open source, hardware independent, and interoperable Residential Gateway. A service-oriented architecture is proposed using the OSGi framework to design the residential gateway and its individual components. These components include an access control component for homeowner authorization, a resource management component for managing connected devices, an automation component to realize an automation service, and finally a context component to provide context aware services to the homeowner. The final design proposed tries to solve the issues faced by some automation systems that are available in market. The evaluation of the design includes whether the design satisfies the basic requirements for a home gateway. This is followed by a comparison with existing systems with an emphasis on the improved features. The components proposed in the design could be used to construct a residential gateway that supports multiple services and multiple users. The proposed design will be taken into consideration during the design of Acreo’s home automation system.