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With recent advancement in technologies used at home, smart home environment allows various resources such as device, network, or content to be connected to one another. Their configurations are changed by dynamic bindings at any time. In this smart home environment, a minor problem in a resource can trigger serious failures in home network services by causing multiple faults to the related resources simultaneously. To solve this problem, it is essential to analyze the dependency between resources and also to diagnose home network faults autonomously. This paper proposes the effective fault diagnosis system based on resource relation map which is dynamically constructed by information convergence model of heterogeneous home resources. The proposed system provides the tracing method for finding the root cause of a fault using the resource relation map. The resource relation map represents the snapshot of home situations at the given time. The proposed fault diagnosis method allows building cost effective remote maintenance system with high availability and manageability by tracing the fault cause along the dependency between resources using graph-style resource relation map as if humans trace the cause of problem. In addition, it can contribute to realize an autonomic fault management system for smart home. In this paper, the prototype of the proposed system is implemented and evaluated for performance in accuracy and latency of fault diagnosis in a real environment. The experimental results show that the proposed system, especially with the suggested back tracing diagnosis system, yields remarkable performance for home network fault diagnosis.

With the advent of smart home devices including Smart TV or smart appliances, home becomes smarter. Smart home is a complex environment where heterogeneous smart devices and appliances are connected to each other to provide various smart services. As the home environments become smarter and more complex, the need for an effective managing mechanism with minimum user's intervention is growing. However, just only putting together all the individual information of each resource is not enough, since it is very hard to catch out overall home situation without the relation information between the managed resources. In this paper, we propose a resource-aware management system with hierarchical smart home resource model, using the home context information which defines the information convergence model of heterogeneous home resources and builds a home knowledge by constructing a resource relation graph. The proposed system can accelerate deployment of advanced future smart home service features such as context-aware dynamic service composition, autonomous fault management systems. In addition, it allows cost effective remote maintenance system with highly convenient manageability. We implemented the prototype system of our proposed architecture and evaluated the performance on the query response time of home resources and relations in a real environment. Results showed that it has acceptable performance for navigating or control of home information and excellent improvements in terms of relation based search. We anticipate that the proposed system will bring the huge benefits not only to the consumers, home network service providers but also to the home network maintenance companies in terms of ease of management, and diagnostic effectiveness.

Various home network middleware such as HAVi, LnCP, LonWorks, and UPnP have been designed. They coexist because one middleware cannot support diverse requests of services and devices. This circumstance creates an interoperability problem among devices based on various types of home network middleware. The Universal Middleware Bridge system is designed and implemented to solve this interoperability problem using a device conversion mechanism and a message translation mechanism among the middleware. These conversion mechanisms make it possible for devices to distinguish and control other devices connected to different middleware networks in the Universal Middleware Bridge system. These mechanisms also easily support new device and middleware by adding some XML files.

Recently, high-speed powerline communication gets great attention as the home network backbone for multimedia services because of the low cost and QoS support. Since a home network is mixed with various types of networks, the high-speed powerline communication is often connected with non-QoS networks such as Ethernet. Then it is very difficult to provide end-to-end QoS for multimedia services in the home network environments since traffics are often transported to Ethernet. In this paper we deal with some QoS issues at the bridge for multimedia service when it connects high-speed powerline communication and Ethernet. Also, we introduce a QoS support Ethernet/high-speed powerline communication bridge system and shows some experimental results in this paper.

This paper presents the IEEE 1394/UPnP software bridge for representing legacy IEEE 1394 devices to UPnP devices. UPnP devices must provide SSDP discovery, SOAP control, and GENA event processes. To represent the legacy IEEE1394 devices to UPnP devices, there have to be the IEEE 1394/UPnP software bridge to provide those functionalities on behalf of IEEE 1394 devices. The bridge can provide additional functions such as A/V data transferring with format converting between IEEE 1394 and UPnP devices. With those functionalities, the bridge makes UPnP control points recognize IEEE 1394 devices as UPnP devices, and makes possible exchange the A/V data between IEEE 1394 legacy devices and normal UPnP devices. Based on the general structure of the bridge, it can be easily extended to support a new IEEE 1394 device type.