Patent Grant
7899912
This invention is directed to the field of telephone networks. It is more particularly directed to cellular telephony as a means for remotely accessing and/or manipulating information and processes.
The use of cellular telephony has become an everyday experience for a lot of people. Cellular telephony permits users to have access to voice services (make calls, receive calls, access voice mail, teleconference, and so on) from practically everywhere without the need to be located next to a fixed wireline telephone, or wait for a telephone booth to become available.
However, the use of fixed-line telephony has some compelling advantages. A telephone number associated with a fixed telephone can be “tied” to the environment in which this telephone is located. Thus, the telephone number of a fixed-line telephone in a home can be used as an identifier of that home. This indeed happens today when, for example, various providers of residential services, e.g., water, electricity, and CaTV public utilities, home heating oil and newspaper delivery services, and so on, use a telephone number as a distinguishing identifier of the recipient of the residential service. Even more so, the advent of the tone telephony signaling and the caller ID feature has permitted the development of a number of applications that permit one to use telephony as a means to access controllable services, like home automation facilities, remotely. For example, this is achieved by installing a telephony-enabled device in a home and connect it to an available public switched telephone network (PSTN) jack in the home. The ring signal generated when calling the telephone number for this PSTN jack could activate a device which then could receive commands remotely by sending it tones generated by a tone dialing telephone (not unlike the practically ubiquitous touch-tone, voice response, interactive services). Doing so, one can use such a system to, say, activate environmental control (heat/AC) services remotely.
One drawback for these purely telephony-based, home devices are that they have limited, if any, capabilities in providing “feedback” or status information for the devices that they control. Interactivity using visual means and in particular textual and graphics means could greatly enhance user experience in accessing remotely and controlling processes that interest various users.
Recently, a new generation of cellular phones have been introduced that take advantage of data cellular services, which is a distinct service from cellular voice telephony, to display data information provided to them by cellular data service and content providers. This information is shown on small displays (typically, 4 to 5 20-character lines) on these cellular phones. These cellular phones are some times called web-phones as the data services provided on them resemble the point-and-click experience and the information collecting and searching capabilities encountered on the Worldwide Web (WWW) using a web-browser on a notebook or desktop computer. Sometimes these phones are also called WAP phones, since a good number of them are using the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) communications protocol suite for carrying the data services to the phones.
Data services on cellular phones focus primarily on e-commerce applications (purchasing of goods through “e-tailers” with presence on the Web), on-line banking, news, stock quote announcements, e-mail and messaging, audio/video downloads, and so on. All these services on the “wireless Web,” a term that we would use without necessary implying the use of the WWW, WAP, etc., protocols, allow the users of the wireless Web to contact businesses, and/or retrieve and manipulate business related information, and/or retrieve casual information (e.g., sports news broadcasting) from service and content providers.
It would be advantageous to further enhance the usability of the wireless Web by providing a capability to use one's personal communication devices, e.g., the cellular phone, to access and manipulate information and processes that they do not necessarily fall in the traditional e-commerce/e-business category.
It is therefore an aspect of the present invention to provide methods and apparatus by which a user accesses that user's home automation system remotely and/or interactively over a long-haul wireless connection.
It is another aspect of this invention to provide visual interactive capability through one's personal device, using a cellular, voice telephony technology, like first and/or second generation cellular telephony systems, without the need to upgrade or modify the existing circuit switched wireless and wireline telephony infrastructure. Clearly, those skilled in the art could apply these concepts for additional instances of use of this invention without departing from the spirit of this invention.
These and other aspects, features, and advantages of the present invention will become apparent upon further consideration of the following detailed description of the invention when read in conjunction with the drawing figures, in which:
The present invention provides a means for a user to access that user's home automation system remotely and/or interactively over a long-haul wireless connection. It also provides methods and apparatus affording visual interactivity capability through one's personal device, using established cellular, voice telephony technologies, like first and second generation cellular telephony systems, without the need to upgrading or modifying the existing circuit switched wireless and wireline telephony infrastructure. Clearly, those skilled in the art could build additional instances of this invention without departing the spirit of this invention. Even though this invention does not restrict itself only to this application, accessing one's home automation system remotely and interactively over a long-haul wireless connection provides a fine example for visualizing an objective of this invention.
In this embodiment, the cellular phone runs a browser application 210 which in turn runs on top of the TCP/IP protocol stack 212. The Point-to-Point protocol (PPP) 214 adapts the packet oriented TCP/IP stack to the serial nature of the underlying communications networks 108 and 109. To physically connect to the telephone networks, a modem 112 is required. The user of the cellular phone can dial-up directly into the server at home, which can be configured as a remote dial-up server, a feature that can be found on, for example, the Windows computer operating system from Microsoft. The PPP protocol layers 214 and 215 in the cellular phone and the home server allow the authentication of the end-to-end communications path between these two devices. Also, the PPP layer at the home server 215 aids in the automatic configuration of the TCP/IP stack at the cellular phone 212, e.g., by assigning an IP address to it. This permits the complementary TCP/IP layers in the cellular phone 212 and the server 213 to connect with each other over the virtual communications pipe formed by the two PPP layers 214 and 215 and inter-operate. Finally, the browser application 210 on the cellular phone can access the browser server 211 on the home server through the virtual communications pipe formed by the TCP/IP layers 212 and 213.
The service access logic 216 that is accessible through the browser server 211 includes the software modules, sometimes referred to as service agents, that can be used to control the various services. These service agents may be web-enabled themselves and thus accessible directly from the browser on the cellular phone. Otherwise, these service agents are web-server technologies, like common-gateway interface (CGI) or Java servlets computer programs that enable the browser server to interact with the services. Note that these agents may be active, i.e., running, at all times, or stored in a directory, say, an Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory and be retrieved and activated only when a user wants to access a particular service.
The service access logic communicates with services 104, 106 using the home distribution network 107, which could be comprised a single network, say an 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN), or an aggregation of networks, e.g., an 802.11 WLAN, an X-10 network, a twisted-pair telephone network, a Bluetooth piconet, and so on. The home distribution communications protocol stack 217 supports the communication protocols that are required to access the services over the various services available through HDN 107. This stack is not specified here. However, this stack can be either a universal one executed by each of the controlled device, e.g., based on the Jini technology from Sun Microsystems, or a set of nonstandard protocols optimized for the communication with each of the different services to be controlled.
The embodiment in
In the previous embodiment, we made a use of a voice, circuit-switched, wireless telephone network to dial-in through the regular PSTN directly to the home server. This approach is very attractive as it generally requires the user to “subscribe” to nothing more that the regular telephony service providers.
While the remote dial-up server capability is natively available or externally added on several popular computer operating systems, its activation requires a user to configure his/her home server. However, user configuration of home computers may not be the first choice in many people's home chores. But, if the computer is connected to an Intranet supported by an ISP then the perils of a user incorrectly configuring the remote dial-up server can be avoided. This is accomplished by placing the remote dial-up server away from the home computer, possibly at an ISP premise.
In this embodiment, the PPP protocol in the cellular phone terminates at a PPP server 303 within the Intranet prior to reaching the home server. This is a typical case experienced when one dials-up into a private, corporate, or public Internet service provider (ISP). The ISP Intranet is accessed over the circuit-switched telephone network 304 at a point-of-presence (PoP) location, which is typically represented by a telephone number to which a subscriber of the ISP calls to connect to the ISP's Intranet. Similarly to the first embodiment, the PPP entity on the ISP side 303, among other things, aids in the configuration of the TCP/IP layer 212 in the cellular phone so as to allow applications running on top of it to utilize the Intranet. In particular, the TCP/IP layer in the cellular phone 212 and the home server 213 form a logical data pipe that routes data from the browser application 210 to the browser server 211. The data could be routed through a number of link technologies over the cellular CS network and the Intranet until they finally reach the NIC in the home server 211. The various link technologies are transparent to the TCP/IP protocols and the applications running on them. Accessing of services through the HDN is done similarly to the first embodiment.
This embodiment points toward a service offering where a service provider provides access to one's home network. The service provider could be an ISP, or a third party. In either case, such a service is generally viable if secure communications between the cellular phone and the home server can be guaranteed. Thus, security processes, like secure socket layer (SSL), and/or secure IP protocol (IPSec) and/or link layer encryption and authentication, etc., should be added to secure the data path from the client to the home server. It is noted that in the first embodiment, security is less of an issue since one dials-in directly to the home server and authenticates oneself through the PPP service on the home server.
The above two embodiments, assume the use of a cellular phone that can use regular circuit-switched wireless technologies and be able to show HTML pages. Those skilled in the art, may connect other personal devices, e.g., a personal digital assistant (PDA), with web-browsing capabilities to the cellular phone prior to accessing services remotely on a home server′ or place some of the home server functionality within a data network outside the home. This allows several users to subscribe to a common, third-party, virtual home-server provider. Such systems are included in the spirit and concepts of the present invention which considers the use of a long-haul, circuit switched wireless network as the network-of-choice attachment for the client device. The device is able to interact with the home server and provide visual information in the form of text and/or graphics (including images) and possibly, but not necessarily, audible and visual feedback, e.g., by switching LED indicators on the client device ON and OFF.
In alternate embodiments of the present invention, security credentials can be assigned to the user of the remote dial-up server, the home server, and/or the service access logic, shown in
The described embodiments represent application examples of instances covered by this invention. Those skilled in the art may apply this invention in ways different than the ones described without departing from the spirit and/or concepts of this invention. As used herein and in the following claims, the term “service” includes a logical operation that can be invoked to execute an action on behalf of another entity. A remote service is a service that can be invoked remotely more particularly for this invention it includes a service that can be invoked over a wireless, circuit-switched, voice telephony system. Moreover, the term “serving entity” represents a physical entity, comprising a software and/or hardware elements, to which one can physically connect and make a request for execution of a service. The serving entity allows the physical execution of a service. For example, “controlling home environment” represents a service that does just that. With respect to
This invention may be formed as an apparatus for a user to interact with at least one service as shown in
The apparatus includes a “client” port 401, which is a telephone port through which the apparatus attaches to the PSTN network 109. The apparatus includes a dial-in service module that implements that dial-in logic. It includes the a PSTN modem to receive the incoming call from the client device in
The browser server 404 is used to obtain, organize, and manipulate data that are received from or send to the client device through the protocol transport module. The data that are sent to the client device are to be displayed and viewed by the browser application in the client device. These data often include a list of services that are accessible remotely by the client device. This list of available services may reside in a service list repository 405. The data received by the browser application in the client device include a selection of at least one service that the user of the client device wants to control and also the action to be taken for the selected service, e.g., increase room temperature by 2 degrees Celsius. Upon the receipt of the action for a selected service, the browser server interacts with the particular service agent 406 that implements the control logic for controlling the selected service. The control signal generated by the service agent 406 leaves the apparatus through the “service” port 407. The service port 407 attaches the apparatus to the home distribution network (HDN) 107 via which the control signal is transmitted to the selected service. In reversing the order, the selected service may send status information over the HDN 107 to the service agent 406 through the “service” port. The service agent will process the status information and pass it to the browser server 404 to be sent for display by the browser application in the client device. The status information includes information to indicate whether the desired result has been achieved, e.g., the thermostat has received the change of temperature command and it has initiate the necessary actions required to change the room temperature.
Although as described, the apparatus described in
This invention may be also be implemented as an apparatus for a user to interact with at least one remote service by implementing the steps of the methods of this invention. Thus, an example apparatus includes: user connecting means for said user connecting to a serving entity using a client device attached to a wireless, circuit-switched, voice telephony network; user viewing means for obtaining and viewing a list of accessible remote services from said serving entity; user selecting means for selecting said at least one remote service from said list; and user access means for accessing and viewing said at least one remote service in obtaining desired results.
The present invention can be realized in hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software. A visualization tool according to the present invention can be realized in a centralized fashion in one computer system, or in a distributed fashion where different elements are spread across several interconnected computer systems. Any kind of computer system—or other apparatus adapted for carrying out the methods and/or functions described herein—is suitable. A typical combination of hardware and software could be a general purpose computer system with a computer program that, when being loaded and executed, controls the computer system such that it carries out the methods described herein. The present invention can also be embedded in a computer program product, which comprises all the features enabling the implementation of the methods described herein, and which—when loaded in a computer system—is able to carry out these methods.
Computer program means or computer program in the present context include any expression, in any language, code or notation, of a set of instructions intended to cause a system having an information processing capability to perform a particular function either directly or after either or both of the following conversion to another language, code or notation, and/or reproduction in a different material form.
Thus the invention includes an article of manufacture which comprises a computer usable medium having computer readable program code means embodied therein for causing a function described above. The computer readable program code means in the article of manufacture comprises computer readable program code means for causing a computer to effect the steps of a method of this invention. Similarly, the present invention may be implemented as a computer program product comprising a computer usable medium having computer readable program code means embodied therein for causing a a function described above. The computer readable program code means in the computer program product comprising computer readable program code means for causing a computer to effect one or more functions of this invention. Furthermore, the present invention may be implemented as a program storage device readable by machine, tangibly embodying a program of instructions executable by the machine to perform method steps for causing one or more functions of this invention.
It is noted that the foregoing has outlined some of the more pertinent objects and embodiments of the present invention. This invention may be used for many applications. Thus, although the description is made for particular arrangements and methods, the intent and concept of the invention is suitable and applicable to other arrangements and applications. It will be clear to those skilled in the art that modifications to the disclosed embodiments can be effected without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. The described embodiments ought to be construed to be merely illustrative of some of the more prominent features and applications of the invention. Other beneficial results can be realized by applying the disclosed invention in a different manner or modifying the invention in ways known to those familiar with the art.
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