Exploring the Universal Plug and Play Architecture

Conclusion

In this article, I presented the basic concepts of UPnP, a very flexible standard that lets computers, peripherals, appliances, and electronic devices automatically connect and share services. By defining and publishing UPnP device and service descriptions through the BRisa UPnP framework, developers have an open source, but powerful, mechanism to simplify the implementation of devices and services.

In this article, I focused on the UPnP Audio and Video specification, but the BRisa UPnP framework also provides extensible resources to implement other kinds of UPnP services, such as tools for controlling home automation devices.

The BRisa UPnP Project is getting attention from many developers, but, like other open source tools, BRisa is a work in progress. We are currently developing BRisa plugins for some well-known online services, including Yahoo Music, Facebook, Orkut, and PicasaWeb. These plugins will let users centralize all their Internet-based multimedia content in one convenient and flexible UPnP service provided by the BRisa media server.

Infos

  1. "Pervasive Computing: A Paradigm for the 21st Century" by D. Saha and A. Mukherjee, Computer, IEEE Computer Society Press, March 2003, pp. 25-31
  2. UPnP Forum: http://www.upnp.org/
  3. "SOAP and Web Services" by P. Louridas, IEEE Software, vol. 23, no. 6, December 2006, pp. 62-67
  4. UPnP AV 1.0 specifications: http://www.upnp.org/standardizeddcps/mediaserver.asp
  5. "BRisa UPnP A/V Framework" by L. Sales, et al., IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics, January 2008, pp. 1-2
  6. "Implementation of the DLNA Proxy System for Sharing Home Media Contents" by J. Kim, et al., IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, vol. 53, no. 1, February 2007
  7. BRisa official website: http://brisa.garage.maemo.org
  8. BRisa End User Documentation: http://brisa.garage.maemo.org/documentation-enduser.htm
  9. IRC Freenode:http://irc.freenode.com, channel brisa
  10. BRisa Developer Documentation: http://brisa.garage.maemo.org/documentation-developer.htm
  11. "MPEG-21 & DIDL: Dawn of a New Multimedia Eve" by S. Hashemipour and M. Ali, IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics, September 2004, pp. 91-95

The Author

Leandro Melo de Sales has enjoyed Linux since 1997 and started the UPnP BRisa project in the end of 2006. He manages the developer group for the BRisa UPnP Framework and its base applications and works at the Embedded Systems and Pervasive Computing Lab/UFCG, which is supported by Nokia Institute of Technology, Brazil. Thanks to the other authors who contributed to this article: Angelo Perkusich, Hyggo Almeida, André Dieb, José Luis, Thiago de Sales, Danilo Freire, and Adrian Livio from Embedded Systems and Pervasive Computing Lab/UFCG; Renato Chencarek and André Magalhães from Nokia Institute of Technology; and Marcello de Sales at the Computer Science department of San Francisco State University (SFSU).

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