Knowledge-based middleware for future home networks

Humans are lazy. They want to get as much support and assistance in their daily life as possible. To provide sophisticated digital butler functionality a system has to monitor the humans and their environment to understand their desires. It has to control all devices to translate the deduced wills into actions. To provide an integrated intelligent environment to the residents it is necessary to overcome the borders of different manufacturers, devices and access technologies. A management and control middleware is needed that shields users as well as high level management services from the technical details of the network of devices by providing a standardized, resilient and secure communication channel. We present a knowledge-based middleware as base for that purpose in this paper. The novel approach is the transparent connection of highly heterogeneous home devices by requiring only very limited functionality per device. Our design allows the desired high autonomicity in a secure and efficient way. ©2009 IEEE.