Remote UI Protocols for Home Environment

Increasing number of home appliances make the User Interfaces (UI) and usability of these devices challenging. In this paper the authors examine different remote UI protocols that enable unified and centralised remote controlling in home environment. The binary UI protocols aim at transferring the native UI with the native look and feel where the markup protocols transfer the description of the UI and hence allow unified look and feel that suits best for the displaying device. This paper examines Widex and UPnP protocols. UPnP is a big interoperability enabler that supports multiple remoting protocols. Widex on the contrary is still in early specification phase but has XML DOM based UI support and hence generic and flexible architecture for UI rendering.