Evaluation of SONICA Compared with UPnP and Jini

The current move towards a ubiquitous network society is encouraging companies to develop various items in preparation for networking. Accordingly, home appliances that operate by themselves are beginning to be equipped with communication interfaces, and these appliances are leading the way and illustrating next generation services. Thus, some platforms for constructing home networks have been proposed, such as DLNA, Jini, and HAVi. Although these platforms are expected to play a large role in the spread of home networks, most of them are based on PC-centric networks. Considering the limited resources of embedded systems, customizability for the end-user, and other specific home appliance requirements, this situation raises issues of software and hardware complexity, cost, power consumption, and so on. The complexity and latitude of services provided largely depends on the architecture of device interaction. In this paper, we propose a new platform named SONICA (Service Oriented Network Interoperability for Component Adaptation). SONICA adopts service oriented interoperability using HTTP methods and a more simple and flexible architecture for device interaction. We also show the usefulness of SONICA as a platform for home networks by conducting evaluations with the existing platforms; UPnP and Jini.