19/09/2020
Classic smart home, internet of things, cloud computing and rule-based event processing, are the building blocks of our proposed advanced smart home integrated compound. Each component contributes its core attributes and technologies to the proposed composition. IoT contributes the internet connection and remote management of mobile appliances, incorporated with a variety of sensors. Sensors may be attached to home related appliances, such as air-conditioning, lights and other environmental devices. And so, it embeds computer intelligence into home devices to provide ways to measure home conditions and monitor home appliances’ functionality. Cloud computing provides scalable computing power, storage space and applications, for developing, maintaining, running home services, and accessing home devices anywhere at anytime. The rule-based event processing system provides the control and orchestration of the entire advanced smart home composition.
Combining technologies in order to generate a best of breed product, already appear in recent literature in various ways. Christos Stergioua et al. [1] merge cloud computing and IoT to show how the cloud computing technology improves the functionality of the IoT. Majid Al-Kuwari [2] focus on embedded IoT for using analyzed data to remotely execute commands of home appliances in a smart home. Trisha Datta et al. [3] propose a privacy-preserving library to embed traffic shaping in home appliances. Jian Mao et al. [4] enhance machine learning algorithms to play a role in the security in a smart home ecosystem. Faisal Saeed et al. [5] propose using sensors to sense and provide in real-time, fire detection with high accuracy.
In this chapter we explain the integration of classic smart home, IoT and cloud computing. Starting by analyzing the basics of smart home, IoT, cloud computing and event processing systems. We discuss their complementarity and synergy, detailing what is currently driving to their integration. We also discuss what is already available in terms of platforms, and projects implementing the smart home, cloud and IoT paradigm. From the connectivity perspective, the added IoT appliances and the cloud, are connected to the internet and in this context also to the home local area network. These connections complement the overall setup to a complete unified and interconnected composition with extended processing power, powerful 3rd party tools, comprehensive applications and an extensive storage space.
In the rest of this chapter we elaborate on each of the four components. In Section 1, we describe the classic smart home, in Section 2, we introduce the internet of things [IoT], in Section 3, we outline cloud computing and in Section 4, we present the event processing module. In Section 5, we describe the composition of an advanced smart home, incorporating these four components. In Section 6, we provide some practical information and relevant selection considerations, for building a practical advanced smart home implementation. In Section 7, we describe our experiment introducing three examples presenting the essence of our integrated proposal. Finally, we identify open issues and future directions in the future of advanced smart home components and applications.
