Abstract
The xAAL home automation system has been designed on the basis of distributed systems principles with messages passing and home network communications over IP. The proposal makes extensive use of standards and provides a clear separation of roles along the distributed system with no predominant actor. This allows openness and interoperability. This objective can be reached once all parts are convinced: consumers, manufacturers, service providers, etc. To get a broad adoption, the proposal comes with fine-tuned communication, architecture, security, and simplicity. Tests and experiments in the long term have led us to optimize the protocol, adjust the architecture, and rearrange device descriptions. This paper provides a full description of the improved system, with all details to make feasible compatible alternative implementations. It also discusses alternatives and all aspects that led us to make structuring choices: CBOR messages on an IP multicast channel, intranet communication, ciphering with Poly1305/Chacha20, structured and extensible abstract device description, and a distributed system architecture.
Highlights
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies aim to use digital products and services to ensure that dependents and seniors at home stay safe, healthy, active and independent
A group just says that some xAAL devices are physically together, and only this This brings no indication about the fact that some of those xAAL devices could be in relationship from a logical or functional point of view or to provide some service. (This is handled within the definition of the schema of the devices, if needed.)
XAAL messages are carried by UDP multicast packets. xAAL messages are made of two layers: (i) a Security Layer with some clear fields mandatory for transport to receivers, followed by a ciphered payload; and (ii) an Application Layer that consists of the decrypted payload and containing all information for participating applications
Summary
Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) technologies aim to use digital products and services to ensure that dependents and seniors at home stay safe, healthy, active and independent It includes smart devices, communication networks and software applications. The authors of [2] have proposed an overview of the state-of-the-art in the field and have investigated AAL system requirements and implementation They organized the analysis by considering the Reference Models (RM) and Reference Architectures (RA). The xAAL specification defines: (i) a functional distributed architecture; (ii) a means to describe and to discover the interface and the expected behavior of participating nodes by the means of so-called schemas; and (iii) a secure communications layer via an IP (multicast) bus.
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