Ametsa: a generic home control system based on UPnP

Home services are gaining more and more interest in the computer science community. In particular, several service discovery systems (SDS) have been proposed that assume the presence of devices interpreting standard and open Internet protocols. However, the lack of home devices understanding such protocols has restricted the proliferation of control applications at home and the utilization of such systems is limited to computer science environments. The "Maison Intelligente" project aims at proposing generic services to control home devices based on SDS in order to ensure the independence from devices manufacturers. We have first developed the Ametsa service which exploits the UPnP SDS in order to be aware of arrival or removal of devices and to send or receive commands to/from available devices. We also propose gateways to connect UPnP to some other protocols. Some experiments have already been performed based on a prototype consisting on Ametsa and two gateways allowing the control of X2D and X10 devices.