ITEE Innovation Expo 2008 : Project Details

Smart Appliances

SmartNet - A Publish/Subscribe-Based System For Smart Homes Christopher Adams and Professor Neil Bergmann The benefits to quality of life provided by smart devices depends on their ability to intercommunicate and leverage the capabilities of other devices. SmartNet is a high level protocol designed specifically for use in smart homes that attempts to provide support for a range of data-transfer mechanisms required by smart devices. It is built on top of the Elvin publish/subscribe content-based routing system, and provides service registration and discovery as well as single shot and streaming data routing mechanisms. The requirements of the protocol were identified through research into previous work in the field, and prototype testing. An example smart device that requires a variety of transfer mechanisms was built to test the capabilities of the network. Devices that support the SmartNet protocol are able to perform service registration and discovery, one-shot event notifications and streaming data transfer, and request functionality from other devices. Single channel MP3 audio data with a 96 kbps bit rate was able to be streamed over the network with no perceivable reduction in audio quality. Video and higher quality (or lossless) audio was unable to be transferred without severe reduction in quality. It is expected that improvements in the performance of embedded microcontrollers will overcome these limitations. If device manufacturers were to adopt SmartNet or another lightweight protocol that promotes interoperability, smart devices could, due to their increased utility, achieve greater market realisation.