USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - WinsSys - August 2000
A Toolkit for Building Dependable
and Extensible Home Networking Applications
Yi-Min Wang, Wilf Russell, Microsoft Research; Anish Arora, Ohio State University
Abstract
Dependability and extensibility are two of the key requirements
to successful home networking. In this paper, we describe the design and
implementation of a software development toolkit for building dependable and
extensible home networking applications. A reliable Soft-State Store (SSS) is
implemented as a shared infrastructure to simplify robust distributed
programming against device and object failures. SSS supports multi-timescale
refreshes and selectively uses persistence to accommodate the battery power and
network bandwidth constraints in the home networking environment. A
publish/subscribe event system allows any changes in the SSS to be propagated
to interested subscribers, which then perform appropriate adaptive, corrective,
alerting, or cleanup actions. An Attribute-Based Lookup Service (ABLS) and a
Name-Based Lookup Service (NBLS), both implemented on top of the SSS for
robustness, provide a level of indirection for supporting extensibility as well
as allowing user-friendly, natural language-based access. We demonstrate the
use of the toolkit for building a home networking system in an actual
deployment. We describe two end-to-end remote home automation applications,
present performance results, and report our experiences.
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