Networked Home Appliances Research Articles

Design and implementation of home network systems using UPnP middleware for networked appliances

This paper describes the design and implementation of a home network system using UPnP middleware and an embedded interface device. The developed home network system comprises a home server program, appliance emulators (e.g., for TV, refrigerator, and air-conditioner), and an embedded interface device for networked home appliances.

Intel’s Asia spend

Intel Corp with a $500m packaging facility in Shanghai is to spend $375m to build a test and assembly plant in Chengdu, in China’s western Sichuan Province. Construction will start in the second half of 2004 and the facility should open in 2005. It will employ about 675 people. Intel and Legend Group Ltd, China’s biggest computer maker, are to open a joint development centre for home networking and security applications. Legend controls about 25% of the Chinese PC market, and its computers use Intel microprocessors exclusively. The centre is to be housed within Legend’s Beijing facilities and would eventually employ 30 to 40 engineers. This is a short news story only. Visit www.three-fives.com for the latest advanced semiconductor industry news.

A systematic evaluation method for the operation and communication reliabilities of the PLC networked home appliances

This paper presents a systematic method of probing channel characteristics and communication reliabilities of home power line communication (PLC) network applied to Internet accessed control of home appliances. The evaluations are performed for the constructed test-bed of 100 apartment houses supplied with four types of PLC installed home appliances, i.e., refrigerator, air-conditioner, washing machine, and microwave oven. The experimental results, showing well above 90% reliability, support the feasibility of commercially deploying PLC modem installed home appliances and their services for Internet accessed home automation in densely populated residential apartment complexes.

A middleware component supporting flexible user interaction for networked home appliances

In this paper, we describe a middleware component supporting flexible user interaction for networked home appliances, which is a simple mechanism to fill the gap between traditional user interface systems and advanced user interaction devices. Our system enables us to control appliances in a uniform way at any places, and the system allows us to select suitable input and output devices according to our preferences and situations. Our system has based on the stateless thin-client system, and translates input and output interaction events according to user interaction devices. We also show the effectiveness of our approach in our home computing systems.

The impact of power limitations and adjacent residence interference on the performance of WLANs for home networking applications

This paper considers the application of 5 GHz wireless LAN technology to home networking applications. An assessment of physical layer performance is presented for both the IEEE 802.11a and HIPERLAN/2 standards in the form of achievable data rate as a function of received signal to noise ratio. The transmit power limitations imposed by the relevant regulatory bodies are presented and the implications of transmit power amplifier limitations considered. Based on this information, a state of the art propagation modelling tool is used to evaluate the performance of the 802.11a and HIPERLAN/2 systems in an example residential environment. The achievable data rate and coverage is evaluated for a variety of scenarios and the implications of potential co-residence interference are evaluated. It is found that data rates greater than 20 Mbits/s can be achieved with 100% coverage if the access point is well located and the transmit power is high. Even in the case where transmit power is severely limited, data rates in excess of 10 Mbits/s can be achieved throughout much of the example environment. Adjacent residence interference is found to have a severe debilitating effect and is thus identified as topic of crucial importance.