Heterogeneous device networking for an AmI environment

Abstract

Assisted living environments involve a wide range of different devices. Most of them are commercially available, but typically associated to standard domotics buses not compatible with each other. Besides, in many cases it is desirable to integrate new devices to a system that might not support the installed bus protocol. Interconnection between devices is far from simple, specially because domotic buses are often proprietary. The most popular solution to this problem is to export information to Ethernet as a system meeting point, but it is not always simple and accessibility in proprietary buses is limited. This paper proposes a method to integrate a variety of platforms through a shared memory interface, including a proprietary bus, commercial devices and ad hoc systems. Its main novelty is that compatibility between different standards is achieved without additional expensive hardware. © Springer International Publishing 2013.