International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE) Vol. 7, No. 4, August 2017, pp. 2085~2093 ISSN: 2088-8708, DOI: 10.11591/ijece.v7i4.pp2085-2093  2085 Journal homepage: http://iaesjournal.com/online/index.php/IJECE Extending UPnP for Application Interoperability in a Home Network Kalaiselvi Arunachalam, Gopinath Ganapathy School of Computer Science, Engineering and Applications, Bharathidasan University, India Article Info ABSTRACT Article history: Received, Dec 1, 2016 Revised, Apr 13, 2017 Accepted, Apr 27, 2017 The Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) technology offers pervasive communication across heterogeneous devices in a home or small office network.The UPnP spefications are available for devices only to be interoperable together in a home or small office network. This paper proposes an extension of the UPnP technology for application interoperability in a home or small office network. This paper provides an UPnP Application Architecture as an extension to the existing UPnP Device Architecture. This extension enhances the feature of UPnP from device interoperability to application interoperability which enables the applications to discover, control and share data with each other in a home or small office network despite of their device type and operating system. In addition to the UPnP Application Architecture, the UPnP Application Template and UPnP Application Service Template are defined towards the development of UPnP- enabled applications that run on heterogeneous devices in a home or small office network. Keyword: Application architecture Application interoperability Home network UPnP UPnP extension Copyright © 2017 Institute of Advanced Engineering and Science. All rights reserved. Corresponding Author: Kalaiselvi Arunachalam, School of Computer Science, Engineering and Applications, Bharathidasan University, Khajamalai Campus, Tiruchirappalli - 620 023, Tamil Nadu, India. Email: kalaiselvi.arunachalam@gmail.com 1. INTRODUCTION The rapid growth of smart devices like Smartphone, Tablet, Phablet, Smart TV, Notebook etc., enables billions of users around the world to use them at their home, office etc. The UPnP technology provides device interoperability through which devices can discover, control and share data with each other in a home or small office network [1]. The countless applications from various categories like entertainment, lifestyle, education, business, health etc. are used on these heterogeneous devices. The application interoperability is the next immediate requirement in a home or small office network where these devices are used together by the user. The application interoperability feature can enable the users to share data like text, image, audio, video, URL etc. between the applications residing on these devices. The application interoperability is more beneficial to the users in terms of interaction, production, communication and time. The device interoperability is enabled by UPnP in a home network already and it is limited to devices only where by devices can communicate with each other. But the discovery, control and data sharing between the applications residing on these devices are very limited. By extending the feature of UPnP for applications, these diverse applications residing on these heterogeneous devices can discover, control and share data with each other irrespective of their device type and operating system in a home or small office network. This paper proposes an UPnP Application Architecture along with the UPnP Application Template and UPnP Application Service Template to develop UPnP applications that are interoperable across heterogeneous devices in a home or small office network.