Constructing Home Network Systems and Integrated Services Using Legacy Home Appliances and Web Services

This article presents a framework that adapts the conventional home electric appliances with the infrared remote controls (legacy appliances) to the emerging home network system (HNS). The proposed method extensively uses the concept of service-oriented architecture to improve programmatic interoperability among multi-vendor appliances. We first prepare APIs that assist a PC to send infrared signals to the appliances. We then aggregate the APIs within self-contained service components, so that each of the components achieves a logical feature independent of device/vendor-specific operations. The service components are finally exhibited to the HNS as Web services. As a result, the legacy appliances can be used as distributed components with open interfaces. To demonstrate the effectiveness, we implement an actual HNS and integrated services with multi-vendor legacy appliances