An Integrated Logical Structure-Based UPnP Architecture

Abstract

The UPnP architecture defines peer-to-peer network connectivity of intelligent appliances, devices, and control points[1,2]. It is designed to bring easy-to-use, transparent, standards-based connectivity to networks, whether these networks are in the home or small business. However, the weakness of the device communication is the problem of the UPnP architecture. For example, in the normal UPnP architecture, to play a video file must find out and navigate each Media Server. It is inconvenient to use and is quite a big work to spend much time to search it. In this paper, we propose an Integrated Logical Structure-Based (ILSB) UPnP architecture to improve the system performance and the proposed architecture will be compatible with standard UPnP devices. Based on the UPnP architecture, the proposed architecture is constructed as a logical structure to integrate each device's service and provide the same capability with each other devices. Based on the architecture, the location of the device can be transparent and provides a more powerful data transmission capability. Once a user plugs a new UPnP device into the network, the capability of the new device will be also plugged into each UPnP devices. Comparing with the normal UPnP architecture, the ILSB-UPnP architecture can provide a higher availability, better performance, and easier-to-use, especially in an environment that devices are highly distributed.