TABLE OF CONTENTS It s kind of fun to do the impossible.
Walt Disney
People expect that when they bring a television or DVD player home, they can just plug it in, hook up a few cables, and the device will just work. These devices perform their functions well and are easy for consumers to install. PC peripherals, on the other hand, have not been as easy to install. Users must be concerned with gory details such as device drivers to get devices to work properly. Recently, Universal Serial Bus (USB) and Plug-and-Play have improved the situation for PC peripherals so that devices can now be automatically detected and device drivers automatically installed. But networked devices, such as an Internet gateway or a networked printer, still require complicated manual setup and configuration.
The UPnP standard brings the PC peripheral Plug-and-Play concept to the home network, with the same ease of use and automatic configuration that users have come to expect with Plug-and-Play devices. Just as devices can be plugged into the PC and automatically detected and configured, consumers of home networking equipment can now easily add UPnP devices to their home networks and have them just work.
[1] UPnP is a certification mark of the UPnP Implementers Corporation.
When USB devices are plugged into a PC they are automatically detected by the operating system, which loads the...
