Building energy-aware smart homes using web technologies

Abstract

New technological advancements allow the Internet to penetrate in embedded computing. IPv6 envisions to merge the physical and the digital world, through the Internet. The Web of Things interconnects the expanding ecosystem of Internet-enabled embedded devices, by reusing well-accepted and understood Web principles. In this work, the principles of the Web of Things are employed for the development of a comprehensive system for home automation. By combining sensor devices with residential smart power outlets, the foundational pillars are built towards energy-aware smart homes that operate with Web technologies. By designing an application framework for smart homes using request queues for communicating with home devices, reliability and time efficiency are ensured while prioritized requests can be easily included to the system and multiple simultaneous family members may be supported. A technical evaluation indicates that Web-enabled smart homes offer acceptable performance while modern Web techniques can contribute in facilitating and optimizing smart home operations and deployment. Finally, it is demonstrated through various case studies that Web-based, energy-aware smart homes have the potential to provide flexible solutions to challenges such as energy awareness, energy conservation and the integration of future smart homes to the smart grid of electricity. © 2013-IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.