A Virtual Overlay Network for Integrating Home Appliances Tatsuo Nakajima,

Various home appliances and personal appliances are expected to be connected to the Internet in the near future, and the number of such appliances will become extremely large. The Internet will provide connectivity between nodes running various services and applications, in order to pro-vide new advanced functionality. However, the conventional IP protocol is not expected to be sufficient for connecting these appliances and services, because these future appli-ances are likely to require their own standardized proto-cols such as Jini and HAVi. Thus, connectivity cannot be achieved without protocol translation. Also, these appli-ances may require their own naming scheme, routing al-gorithm, and mobility/multicast supports. Therefore, it is preferable for these functionalities to be customized accord-ing to their respective applications. Since adding new func-tionalities to the IP protocol is too generic for most applica-tions, we believe that future networks should be customized according to the characteristics of the respective applica-tions. In this paper, we propose a virtual overlay network for integrating networked home appliances. Virtual overlay networks enable new application-specific networks to be built on existing networks. The proposed virtual overlay network is designed to access a variety of appliances on home networks from personal or home appliances on other home networks. The paper describes the motivation of our work, and the design and the current status of the proposed virtual overlay network. We think that the approach proposed in the paper will also be useful for building virtual overlay networks for other applications such as continuous media streaming or peer-to-peer storage systems.