Home systems

HAVi and CEBus

• HAVi and CEBus are competing standards for describing and accessing home devices over a network of some kind
• CEBus has a longer history, nearly 20 years old
• HAVi is more recent and can use more modern technologies
• Both have to address a common set of issues

Common issues

• Range of devices
• "legacy" versus "aware" devices
• Transport mechanisms
• Identity of devices and components
• Advertisement of services
• Service discovery
• Service invocation
• Failure
• User interfaces

HAVi

HAVi (Home Audio Visual Interoperability Architecture) is concerned with the following home devices

• tuner
• VCR
• clock
• camera
• AV disk
• display
• amplifier
• modem
• web proxy

OSGi

• OSGi is Open Sytems Gateway Interface
• An internet gateway connects a local network to the internet
• An internet gateway passes IP datagrams between the local network and the internet, and does not know about applications
• OSGi adds application awareness
• External entities can interact with internal entities at the application level via an OSGi gateway
• For example, a vendor can upload a new version of a system to an OSGi gateway, and the application can retrieve and install this new version from the gateway
• The vendor does not need to know the configuration of the internal network, and the internal applications do not need to know the details of external vendors