User demands and technological advances are moving us closer to the pervasive computing vision. The home of the future will include networked appliances that publish the functions they offer as intelligent middleware services. In the conventional home network systems, a powerful centralized server controls all electric home appliances connected to provide value-added integrated services. However, when the number of the appliances increases and the appliances become more sophisticated, the conventional architecture would suffer from problems in superfluous resources, flexibility, scalability and reliability. This paper presents Service Oriented Architecture as a new architecture to solve the problems. We propose a two-layered design of an appliance, including device and service layers. The device layer corresponds to the physical device of the appliance controlled by vendor-specific interfaces. The service layer exhibits features of the device as self-contained services accessible via device-independent interfaces. Thus, the appliances are loosely coupled at the service layer without any centralized server. This enables more flexible, robust and load-balanced integrated services.
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