PhD ceremony Mr. E.U. Warriach: Design and implementation of a middleware platform for a smart home

PhD ceremony: Mr. E.U. Warriach

Dissertation: Design and implementation of a middleware platform for a smart home

Promotor(s): prof. M. Aiello

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Embedded systems are dedicated computers used to monitor and control physical spaces. These systems are becoming increasingly common around us, examples being smart buildings (Home and Office), digital libraries, and health monitoring systems.

Moreover, the networking of such embedded environments is enabling to execute smart tasks in which devices control and communicate with each other and show autonomous and coordinated behavior. Provision for interoperation, dynamic discovery, sensing of the current execution context, and run-time service compositions are among the most interesting features of such infrastructures. Furthermore, the users have a central role, which in turn means challenges to the current middleware and service technologies in terms of interoperability, heterogeneity, scalability, extendability, fault tolerance, platform independency, adaptability and usability. The dissertation is about a service-oriented middleware platform for a smart home. The topics investigated in this thesis belong to the different layers of a proposed architecture. First, a heterogeneous device discovery component is introduced to incorporate devices independently from the implemented communication interface together with a machine learning method for automated on-line fault detection and classification at the sensor level. Second, a service-oriented middleware is designed and implemented to integrate Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), Bluetooth and ZigBee protocols in an Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based framework. Third, a middleware client layer is designed and implemented for the user to interact with the proposed middleware of a smart home.