UPnP Tutorial – Universal Plug and Play Technology
Posted on November 12th, 2008
UPnP – Universal Plug and Play – is a technology intended for smart homes, small offices and other
types of local area networks. It was originally created by Microsoft Corporation in 1999. UPnP is now
under the control of the UPNP forum (http://www.upnp.org), an independent organization with over 770
members. The technical inspiration behind UPnP was to provide a distributed computing framework
based on web technologies for small networks, especially home networks.
The Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is a consortium of over 240 consumer electronics companies whose goal is to develop the standards needed for interoperable networked products for Digital Homes.
DLNA specifications are based primarily on UPnP.
UPnP specifications can be divided into: Architecture and Profiles. The UPnP Device Architecture (UDA)
is the core upon which the device and service specifications are built. The UDA defines two types of
hosts: control points (which are clients) and devices. Devices may include “services”. Devices may be
embedded within other devices.
The architecture has six main features:
1. Addressing – IPv4 and IPv6 auto-configuration protocols
2. Discovery – SSDP (Simple Service Discovery Protocol)
3. Description – XML, data types, device and service descriptions
4. Control – SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
5. Events – GENA (General Event Notification Architecture)
6. Presentation – HTML and vendor extensions
UPnP technology has very strong roots in standard Web technologies. It is based on IP, HTTP, Web
browsing, XML and SOAP. The UPnP discovery protocol, SSDP, reuses HTTP headers. GENA is a
“publish and subscribe” protocol based on HTTP. Though UPnP data types are derived from XML
Schema data types, UPnP descriptions were not originally based on WSDL. This specification did not
exist when UPnP was created. However, efforts are underway to encourage eventual convergence.
UPnP device and service profiles must conform to the mandatory behavior of a UPNP device or service.
However, UPnP Device and Service profiles are not limited to the technology specified in the UDA. Other
protocols, codecs, etc. may be specified as optional or vendor extensions.
Reference: http://www.w3.org/2006/02/reynolds-paper.pdf
Tags: Universal Plug and Play Technology Tutorial, UPnP Tutorial
Filed under UPnP | No Comments »