Integrated Intra-HAN and Inter-HAN service interoperability

Abstract

In recent years the Home Area Network (HAN) has been going through a revolution. From enabling multiple desktops in the household to share an Internet connection, it evolved as a service-oriented platform, enabling devices to communicate with each other. The HAN hosts devices from multiple applications domains including entertainment, home automation, security and healthcare. A plethora of different technologies have been suggested for addressing the challenges of the HAN, have been widely deployed. These protocols and standards enable devices and services to be discovered and to interact with each other, however they lack native support for service composition, are incompatible with each other, and are limited by design to a single HAN. While service interoperability efforts have focused traditionally on a single household, the growing interest and user demand for content sharing has promoted efforts into supporting interoperability of the existing HAN service between HANs. While a number of systems in literature address the intra-HAN and inter-HAN service interoperability separately, the problem of integrated service interoperability across both remains unsolved. This thesis therefore addresses the need for an integrated system to support both intra-HAN service interoperability enabling services from multiple service protocols to interact and be composed, and inter-HAN service interoperability, enabling services from multiple service protocols to be securely shared with remote HANs. This thesis synthesises the requirements for an integrated service interoperability system and introduces the integrated Krox system architecture and design that satisfy these requirements through a pluggable architecture with plug-ins per service protocol and an extensible event model that specifies the interaction between plug-in components in remote HANs. The Krox architecture supports inter-HAN service interoperability through service virtualisation. It supports intra-HAN service interoperability through representation of local and remote services as web services in the local HAN enabling their composition using standard web service orchestration techniques. The Krox system architecture builds on the Instant Messaging & Presence (IM&P) user metaphor, to share devices and composite services between HANs in a secure and scalable manner. This thesis demonstrates the feasibility of the architecture and its generality across service technologies through the implementation of plug-in instances for UPnP and Jini. The thesis presents an evaluation of the key Krox system performance parameters that affect intra-HAN and inter-HAN service interoperability. Finally the thesis includes a comprehensive security analysis of potential relevant attacks on a HAN and how they can use the system to spread to remote HANs.