Multiplex communications – Special services – Distribution of signal to multiple agent stations
Reexamination Certificate
2002-06-18
2004-09-21
Kizou, Hassan (Department: 2662)
Multiplex communications
Special services
Distribution of signal to multiple agent stations
C709S205000, C709S206000, C709S230000, C709S245000, C709S246000, C340S539140
Reexamination Certificate
active
06795404
ABSTRACT:
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to electronic device interactions. More specifically, the present invention relates to an aggregator of device interaction for an environment.
BACKGROUND
Electronic devices such as household appliances, audio-video equipment, computers, and telephones operate within a given environment such as the home of a user. However, these devices function independently of one another. The user must initiate actions on the devices to cause the devices to change to a particular state of operation to thereby perform a function desired by the user.
Often, the state of one or more of the electronic devices is related to the state of one or more other electronic devices within the same environment. For example, a user may be watching television (TV) when the telephone rings. The user wishes to answer the call, but to effectively communicate with the caller, the user must mute the television so that sound from the TV does not interfere with the telephone conversation. Every time a telephone call is to be answered while the user watches TV, the user must again repeat the muting process. For each call, once the user hangs up the phone, the TV must be manually unmuted so that the user can once again listen to the TV program being watched.
The TV—telephone scenario discussed above is only one example. There is an undeterminable number of scenarios and devices involved within a given environment. In each scenario, the devices do not communicate with one another and do not coordinate activities, and as a result the user is overly burdened. The number of electronic devices for a household is continually increasing, and the resulting burden on the user to manually coordinate states of the devices for given scenarios is increasing as well.
To address this problem, devices can be configured with communication abilities so that they can communicate with one another when one or more devices experience a user driven state change. However, when several devices are involved in the interaction, various complexities are introduced. As devices and associated interactions are added to the environment, communication paths begin to multiply non-linearly necessitating wider bandwidths to accommodate the increase. Interaction rules become ambiguous because devices down a chain of interaction cannot determine a proper state change due to several degrees of removal from the user driven event.
Additionally, many different transports are available for communication between devices. Absent a standard specifying a transport for an environment, any transport may be chosen as the transport for a particular device. If two devices are not equipped with the same transports, then communication between the devices becomes impossible. These devices will not satisfactorily coexist and interact in an environment.
Therefore, there is a need for aggregating communication paths, interactions, and/or message transports within a device environment to address these problems.
SUMMARY
Embodiments of the present invention address the problems discussed above through application of an aggregator to the device environment. An aggregator embodiment may be employed to act as a single point of communication between many devices thereby limiting the communication paths to the number of devices in the environment. An aggregator embodiment may also be employed to accept communications from multiple transport types to act as a translator between devices of different transports. An aggregator embodiment may also be employed to control device interaction by employing interaction rules.
An aggregator device embodiment includes at least one transmitter and at least one receiver. The embodiment also includes a memory that stores interaction rules for the plurality of devices of the environment. A processor in communication with the transmitter, receiver, and memory is also included. The processor is configured to receive a message from a first device through the at least one receiver, reference the interaction rules in relation to the message from the first device to direct communications through the at least one transmitter to one or more devices of the plurality.
The logical operations of the processor that involve implementing the interaction rules are embodied in methods. The methods specify how a particular device or group of devices communicate. One embodiment of a method involves transmitting a message to the aggregator from a first device and receiving the message at the aggregator. The aggregator references interaction rules in relation to the message from the first device to direct communications from the aggregator to one or more devices of the plurality.
Another embodiment of a method involves detecting a change of state at a first device and in response to detecting the change of state, transmitting a change of state message to the aggregator. The aggregator receives the change of state message and references interaction rules in relation to the change of state of the first device to determine a change of state instruction for a second device of the plurality. The aggregator then transmits the change of state instruction to the second device.
The various aspects of the present invention may be more clearly understood and appreciated from a review of the following detailed description of the disclosed embodiments and by reference to the drawings and claims.
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Jarboe Andre
Kleinfelter Kevin
Kreiner Barrett
Olsson Stefan
Slemmer John B.
BellSouth Intellectual Property Corporation
Kizou Hassan
Levitan Dmitry
Merchant & Gould
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