In forthcoming home network environment, computation capability will be embedded invisibly in home appliances, sensors, walls, ceilings, and floors. People will conduct various tasks using multiple devices simultaneously without consciousness of using computers. In this paper, first, we propose an application model named Virtual Network Appliance (VNA) model which simplify and expand device utilization. In the model, each device has VNA runtime system and function objects, called VNA components, running on it. A user task is defined in an application called VNA which is a logical appliance consisting of abstract function requirements and a message graph among them. Second, we propose Virtual Plug&Play mechanism which is a dynamic service integration mechanism in VNA model implementation. When a user conducts a task, he/she makes a VNA runtime system on a user-side terminal load a VNA definition appropriate for the task. Virtual Plug&Play dynamically discovers required VNA components and establishes the message graph as defined. Since XML documents are used to describe a VNA, users can share and customize it easily. We call the device integration done by Virtual Plug&Play top-down integration, which existing middleware do not aim at. Finally, we show that Virtual Plug&Play affords practical performance for top-down integration by performance evaluation.

In this article, we shall propose an efficient anonymous channel protocol for wireless communications. The most important feature of our proposed protocol has the property of untraceability. In our scheme, the mobile stations (MSs) and the home network (HN) must authenticate each other. Moreover, the HN is untraceable in such a way that supports location anonymity and MSs identity anonymity for MSs roaming, dynamic channel assignment and broadcasting. Compare our protocol with Juang et al.'s protocol, our mobile agent communication cost is 3m which is more efficient than the Juang et al.'s protocol 5m. At the same time, our mobile agent computation cost is 2Th which is also more efficient than the Juang et al.'s protocol 1Tpublic+1Th. We can avoid employing public key cryptography in the anonymous channel ticket authentication phase since to keep the computation cost down.