A fully friendly smart home architecture

In the current age of the explosive semiconductor and mobile industry, new electronic devices continue to emerge at a rapid pace. These devices will be new to existing smart homes. Adding these devices to existing smart home architectures should be transparent, but is currently impossible with today's smart homes. To our knowledge, users without programming experience only can use applications developed by a vendor, and this is not convenient for users. There is no way for users to construct their own home applications without programming experience. The architecture proposed in this paper introduces a virtual resource concept to improve programmability, availability and portability of home applications. Developers use virtual resources to construct applications. At application runtime, virtual resources will be automatically bound to the best available real resources. The architecture proposed in this paper introduces a device classification mechanism and device discovery protocol to introduce new devices transparently into the system and an application framework concept to support users without programming experience to easily construct their own home applications. Experimental results show that the architecture proposed in this paper improves availability, extensibility and portability of home applications.