Home demonstrator

Home demonstrator overview

The home demonstrator platform spans the home and the telecommunications domains. It integrates contributions from Borderlight, Alcatel-Lucent, IBBT, Schneider Electric, Thales, I&IMS and UPM.
• The Borderlight network infrastructure provides fibre-to-the-apartment with high-speed internal home-network based broadband connections. In each apartment, Borderlight installs its Home Adaptive Network™ digital residential gateway that provides quadruple-play networking services: VoIP, IPTV, Internet and home control, each implemented through a separate virtual local network (VLAN).
• Schneider Electric contributes its IHC (Intelligent Home Controller) that controls home automation devices such as lighting, shutters and blinds, thermostats, smoke detectors, etc. through a proprietary fieldbus. IHC - a commercial product, distributed in Sweden by Schneider’s ELKO subsidiary - has been extended with a DPWS gateway, such that the field devices it controls appear as if they were native DPWS devices.
• Thales contributes an experimental wireless sensor network (WSN) for movement tracking & vital signs monitoring, equipped with a mediator device that exposes the WSN’s functionality as a DPWS device.
• UPM & I&IMS contribute DPWS-enabled cameras, capable of streaming video information on specific event triggers. The cameras are commercial products donated by AXIS, to which DPWS connectivity has been added.
• Alcatel-Lucent & IBBT contribute their service composition & delivery middleware, allowing service providers to readily create, modify and deploy scenarios made up of individual Web Services (DPWS/other) and telecom services (e.g. SIP-based).

The demonstrator is located in an apartment owned by Uppsalahem, a public landlord that rents apartments to Uppsala inhabitants. Uppsalahem is one of the larger public landlords in Sweden offering high-tech services in their apartments such as real-time consumption metering, information screens, electronic locking etc. Public landlords are financed by their respective municipalities based on the demand for housing. As a result all public landlords are in competition with each other to offer a technically superior, secure and comfortable home to attract more occupants. Correspondingly, the support from Uppsalahem to the SODA demonstrator denotes strong interest in potential exploitation. In this regard, the demonstrator apartment may serve as a "technology showroom".

Borderlight provides the networking infrastructure to Uppsalahem. New apartments are completely cabled with two high-speed Ethernet outlets in each room. Borderlight delivers broadband Internet access, IP telephony, high-definition IP television and home control services. Each of these network-level services is supported by a dedicated network to ensure quality of service. Borderlight’s Home Adaptive Network™ recognizes each networked device for its service type and auto-configures its ports to provide the appropriate service level. It also offers automatic service mobility, i.e., a device can move around in the home network without re-configuration. The network bandwidth is such that home control services may be provided from the network core.

Extent and advantages of the SODA approach

The home & telecom demonstrator goes beyond managing lighting, shutters, smoke alarms, HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning) … Its service composition component allows for “mashing up” disparate services in a flexible manner, that is, without each service being aware of the existence and peculiarities of the other services it interacts with, and without these interactions having to be hard-coded. Reorganization of the service interactions is thus greatly facilitated. This flexibility, combined with the capability of providing and coordinating services from the network core, enables:
• new remote interaction patterns, such as home-to-office, home-to-home and home-to-nomadic;
• new business models through the offering of either flat-rate or pay-per-use added-value services, either by the network service provider, by the landlord or by an authorized third-party company.

The traditional approach for offering third-party services is to download and install software to a residential gateway. The proposed SODA approach opens the perspective of applying the Software-as-a-Service paradigm:
• Given the quality of the network access, common home control services can be provided from the network core, which obviates the need for an “intelligent” residential gateway as well as the need to address information security and privacy issues.
• New functionalities can be deployed to end devices, e.g., software upgrades, calendar-based and weather-based control, e-mail notifications.
• Home devices can directly interact with “cloud-based” services, allowing service providers and landlords to sell added-value services and/or third parties to provide specific services across the Internet. Such services can either be automated network-based services or bring remote human operators in the loop, e.g., intrusion detection and notification, patient monitoring, remote supervision, trouble-shooting and maintenance.
• For tenants, this will be cost-effective, as they will only need to buy or rent plug-and-play DPWS devices and added-value services.

Example scenario

An example scenario, depicted by the diagram below, may help illustrate the SODA approach. In this care-for-elders scenario, a person's physical activity and vital signs are monitored through non-intrusive wireless sensors. In case of an alarm, the WSN can determine the zone where the person is located, the camera zooms in and video is streamed to a health centre, which can send assistance if necessary. A phone call can be made to a relative if there happens to be one in the surroundings. In case of a non-critical event (summer heat, low physical activity…) a call can be established with a relative or social assistant to ask if he/she is doing fine.
Elderly will represent 25% of the Swedish population in five years from now. Allowing them to live longer on their own with some assistance is beneficial both in terms of public well-being and in terms of public social expenses.

This scenario shows the power of being able to flexibly integrate device-provided Web Services, "ordinary" Web Services and telecommunications services. Setting up or modifying the scenario takes place through a graphical user interface and results in automatic code generation.

An extract from this scenario was demonstrated at the ITEA2/ARTEMISIA 2008 Symposium, held in Rotterdam, Netherlands, in October 2008.

A video presentation of this demonstrator is provided in the Documents section of this Web site.