MAHI: A Multiple Stage Approach for Home Network Interoperability

Interoperability is one of the fundamental functions of a home network because such networks must support many different types of devices and services. Interoperability can be realized by converting messages among different middleware with rules. However, it is very difficult to define common rules to accommodate all differences among various middleware. In addition, most interoperability approaches only address the conversion of the message format and schema, and occasionally these are not enough for a semantic conversion. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to solve the interoperability problem. For this, we classify three interoperability types, i.e., schema, profile, and procedure, and define the rules for each type. We called this interoperability scheme the Multiple stage Approach for Home network Interoperability (MAHI). In this paper, we present the design and implementation of MAHI for a three-stage conversion process. Finally, we illustrate some experimental and quantitative results. In the experiments, MAHI can provide efficient interoperability among different middleware and MAHI will be a method to deal with a complex home network interoperability.