Actinium: An App Server for the Smart Home

Bachelor's thesis at the Institute for Pervasive Computing, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich

Author: Martin Lanter

Supervison: Matthias Kovatsch, Prof. Friedemann Mattern

Abstract: We present the Actinium (Ac) App-server for Californium, a server design for apps written in JavaScript. The targeted use-case is the smart home environment, but the concept can also be ported to business and industry scenarios. Actinium extends the Californium (Cf) CoAP framework by integrating the Mozilla Rhino engine to provide support for JavaScript apps. Apps can dynamically be installed, removed, and updated at runtime and can export their configuration and output as CoAP resources. Furthermore, we propose the CoAPRequest API, an interface for JavaScript apps to communicate asynchronously and synchronously with other CoAP resources. The CoAPRequest API is designed similarly to AJAX's XMLHttpRequest API. Actinium monitors all the apps and provides information about them, such as CPU usage, message throughput and more. Although performing about factor ten slower than native implementations, the application logic is executed fast enough to orchestrate devices in a low-power network.

Thesis: Actinium: An App Server for the Smart Home (PDF)