Experiences with building middleware for audio and visual networked home appliances on commodity software

In this paper, we describe our currently ongoing work to build distributed middleware for networked audio and visual home appliances, which is executed on commodity software. The current prototype has adopted HAVi(Home Audio/Video Interoperability) as distributed middleware for controlling home appliances, which makes it possible to integrate a variety of home appliances and services. In our system, we have implemented HAVi in Java. Programs processing continuous media that emulate digital consumer devices are directly implemented on the Linux operating systems. Since Java and Linux are running on a variety of embedded platforms, our software can be ported to a target embedded system without, the modification. Therefore, new home applications can be developed on a standard PC platform, and this makes the development cost of future advanced home appliances dramatically cheap.