Methods, systems and apparatus for providing device status information within a communication network

摘要

A method and system for updating device identification and status information in response to a local bus reset within a home audio/video network. Several consumer electronics products, e.g., television, VCR, tuner, set-top box (e.g. intelligent receiver/decoder, IRD), DVTRs, PCs, DVD players (digital video disk), etc., can be coupled within the network to communicate together via a standard bus, such as an IEEE 1394 serial communication bus (30). In one embodiment, the communication architecture used is the home audio/visual initiative (HAVI) format. The HAVI network offers unique advantages to consumer electronic vendors because the architecture offers for the home network many of the advantages of existing computer system networks. Interconnected devices can share resources and provide open, well defined APls that allow ease of development for third party developers. Devices of the network are informed of the current status of the network after a local bus reset caused when a device (e.g. 20) is inserted into the network or when a device is removed from the network. After a reset, a new global unique identifier (GUID) list (510) is generated by a driver (320) and passed to a high level program (250). The high level program (250) then compares the new GUID list (510) with its own copy of an older version and generates a list of devices added to the network after the bus reset and a list of devices removed from the network after the bus reset. This information is then forwarded to all devices on the network that previously specified certain call back information regarding current device status.