An autonomic approach to offer services in OSGi-based home gateways

Abstract

The home IT environment is one the most promising areas for telecom operators. Nowadays, home area networks (HAN) are composed of a variety of heterogeneous devices, such as computers, webcams, sensors, set-top-boxes, etc. A key element in a HAN is the home gateway: a device managing the different networks in the home environment. But the management of this environment is a complex task, with an increasing number of heterogeneous devices interconnected. This paper proposes the application of the “autonomic communications” paradigm to this problem. Under this paradigm, each device has the intelligence for accomplishing the self-* functionalities: self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing and self-protection.

This paper describes a proof of concept of an autonomic communications architecture to solve the self-configuration problem. Using a home gateway, with the OSGi framework deployed, an autonomic element has been developed with the goal of finding and personalizing the service offer for a specific user. The autonomic element is context aware, as it senses devices connected to the home network together with user preferences. The services and profiles are modeled with an ontology in OWL, as well as reasoning rules in SWRL which are used by the autonomic element for inferring useful services and proposing a personalized service offer for each customer. The autonomic element has been implemented as an OSGi application and its performance has been evaluated providing successful results.

Introduction

The home IT environment is one of the most promising areas for telecom operators. Nowadays, home area networks (HAN) are composed of a variety of heterogeneous devices, such as computers, PDAs, webcams, sensors, set-top-boxes, etc. A key element in a HAN is the home gateway: a device always connected to Internet which manages the different networks in the home environment.

But managing these home area networks is a complex task, with an increasing number of devices interconnected, and with heterogeneous technologies (surveillance devices, appliance controllers, and so on). Furthermore, in a home there is no IT-System Department. Normal users can be disinclined to know technical details to manage their infrastructure, even if they own such devices. Normal users want to enjoy services, without being burdened with technical details in order to configure and manage their devices.

So, this is a perfect area for the application of the so-called “autonomic communication” initiative [2]: “autonomic communication is a paradigm in which the applications and the services are not ported onto a pre-existing network, but where the network itself grows out of the applications and the services that end users wants”. Under this paradigm, each device has the intelligence for accomplishing the self-* paradigm: self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing, self-protection and self-governance. In this paper, we are focusing on one of the main tasks in this paradigm: self-configuration.

The configuration of a home gateway involves many tasks, including the configuration of the services that are offered to the user. These services are offered by the service providers, and have to be installed and configured in all the home gateways of the different users. Additionally, the offer of services is dynamic and can evolve also with the evolution of the devices connected in the home area network. For example, if the user installs some surveillance sensors, the service provider can offer him dynamically a new service for providing him with remote surveillance capacity.

Autonomic communications and self-configuration can help users and service providers to cope with this complexity: it can enable the systems to know what is happening in their surroundings, as well as to adapt their behavior in an automatic and autonomous way.

This paper demonstrates a proof of concept on the specification and implementation of an autonomic communication-based system, in order to achieve a highly scalable solution that will enable service providers to offer services to thousands of customers in the same way as if there were just few of them. Therefore, this proof of concept has a limited scope in order to demonstrate that such architecture allows building scalable solutions to manage complex environments. Future investigation will extend this project to include the already mentioned additional configuration issues.

On a home gateway, using the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) [3] as the framework installed on it, an autonomic element (AE) has been built. The AE’s goal is to find and offer personalized and available services for specific users. The AE is able to automatically find and show the services that fit best for each user according to the devices installed in the HAN and the characteristics of the subscription. The service providers’ only responsibility is to define services and service profiles enabling the AE to extract useful services and to make a personalized advertisement for each customer.

For the AE construction, an information model based on ontologies has been developed, as well as behavioral rules applied to the ontology instances, so that an inference engine can reason with them. The implementation of the AE was included in the home gateway and evaluated from a functional and performance point of view.

This paper is structured as follows: the next sections briefly present the related technologies contained herein: the OSGi framework and autonomic systems. A scenario is then presented illustrating the usage of the developed system. Continuing, the architecture of the AE is analyzed. The defined ontology is then given, as well as the rules used to calculate the suitable services for a user. Finally, the implementation of the system is described as well as the results of the performance evaluation. The paper finishes assessing some related work and conclusions.