Device aggregation with data networking : Implementing a Personal Area Network

Sammanfattning: Technology is advancing rapidly and intelligent devices are becoming affordable and wireless infrastructure is becoming pervasive. Personal information technology appliances have become part of our life, via cellular phones, PDAs, Bluetooth headsets, handheld keyboards, GPS, and digital cameras. In the future, new intelligent devices will be invented as technology evolves. However, because multiple devices provide similar (but different) functionality it is complex for the average user to choose a single device. Moreover, today it is hard to configure, administer, and use several different appliances together. In order to be utilized in an effective manner and in an accessible way, personal devices should be aggregated, i.e., connected together via a local area network so that they can appear to the user as if they were a single device. This paper introduces a connection model based on device aggregation to realize shared state, the behavior of a shared appliance, and with the superset of the individual device functionality. Such an aggregated logical device might even exhibit functions which a user would have a very hard time realizing by manually combining devices. This will facilitate the user’s control over their appliances (build of different devices), but acting as one device. The project was a joint effort with David Sabaté Mogica. We developed such a system based on Dynamic Host Client protocol (DHCP) and Service Location Protocol (SLP) for service discovery and Virtual Network Computing (VNC) for remote desktop control. The system builds on a laboratory network environment. This thesis concerns the implementation and evaluation of service discovery. The Remote desktop control was researched and implemented separately and will be reported separately. Service discovery between two computers has been implemented using a custom program developed for a PDA. However, at present the PDA only sends a DA request packet with DHCP. However, service discovery has been successfully tested between two computers. This provided an important base for the programming on PDA and the future development of a similar program for a cellular phone.