Feasibility of service architectures for digital home systems: Master's thesis

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be seen as an emerging trend in enterprise computing systems, whereas service-orientation in general, applied in the form of service architectures, provides a much wider field of application possibilities. This thesis defines a model of a service architecture based on the existing state-of-the-art research and technologies. The criteria for a service architecture are drawn from the model and an analysis based on the criteria is carried out on the following service-based software technologies: Service Component Architecture, OSGi Service Framework, Web services and Multimedia Home Platform. An experimental system was implemented to demonstrate the inter-working of different service platforms to provide a lighting control service in a digital home environment. The service is accessible through various technologies, including Universal Plug and Play, Web services and HyperText Transfer Protocol, and provides an opportunity for effortless future extensions on demand, as enabled by the service architecture realised in the OSGi Service Framework. This thesis presents the theory and validates the vast possibilities that service architectures open up for the whole service engineering industry.