AIM Architecture

The figure illustrates a detailed diagram of the overall AIM architecture. To realise inter-working with the home network, AIM introduces a dedicated functional entity, called Energy Management Device (EMD), that will implement, in a generic way and for all the appliance types, monitoring and control power consumption functions.

EMDs will utilise an independent, common for all appliances architecture, which will be specified in WP2, task 2.2 and designated in WP3. This architecture will convey logic for both active and stand-by appliances and will feature generic communication interfaces to the home network, towards the power consumption management logic of the residential gateway and the appliances on which EMDs will be attached.

The next step towards integrating the functions of the EMD with the home network will involve development of appropriate logic on the residential gateway that will allow wrapping the EMD functions with services in the in the context of user configurable applications. In this effort, the project will base its service architecture on the open residential gateway of ESTIA, which, on one hand, provides all means of communicating with the appliances of the home environment, via a multitude of ready-to-use physical interfaces (e.g. Powerline, WiFi, etc) and open services deployment environment (OSGi, etc), while on the other hand, its open architecture allows scalable deployment of additional, higher-level functionality.

Having both the EMD and the virtualisation technologies in hand, AIM will work on the exploitation aspects of its architecture, a task that will involve design and implementation of an adequate number of use-cases. These use-cases will be elaborated in WP5 and will be built using network services and user applications that will feature terminal independency and capability for indoor and outdoor use, through communication network operator networks.