The Home Network is a pervasive environment by nature. Its openness to dynamic distributed and heterogeneous devices brings great challenges in home application design. We present here an open architecture for home service development. Distribution and heterogeneity are managed by service-oriented drivers leveraging the “service platform” concept. Our project provides an open source driver combining Web Services and OSGi standards to compose home services. Performance test results illustrate the service-oriented design.

The home environment becomes ready to host distributed devices dynamically adapting to service availability and reacting to user location and user activity. Sensors, high definition rendering systems, home gateways, wired and wireless controllable equipments are now available. Many protocols enable connectivity and interaction between devices. However, challenges remain: protocol heterogeneity, interface fragmentation and device composition static aspect make self-organization and dynamic reconfiguration hardly achievable. This paper describes attractive scenarios at home which lead to the definition of the pervasive service composition requirements. A software architecture facing the mentioned challenges is proposed over OSGi. It first enables developers to implement distributed plug-n-play applications like a local one. It also delivers a service-oriented middleware allowing spontaneous distributed service composition to occur at runtime.

The Amigo project aims to develop a networked home system enabling the ambient intelligence / pervasive computing vision by effectively integrating devices and their hosted services in today’s home. The Amigo system architecture poses limited technology-specific restrictions, supporting interoperability among heterogeneous services.

This paper presents a 100% Java middleware that aims to offer an open and extensible foundation for building large-scale real-time networked virtual environment applications. This platform relies on a partial replication model in which the whole simulation space is spread on a federation of processes based on application-specific criteria. A configurable event communication framework allows arbitrary consistency and synchronization protocols to be implemented in close cooperation with the application semantics. This middleware has been experimented with success for multi-player game prototypes involving both human-driven and autonomous simulated entities.