Georgios Myrizakis, "iHome: smart home management as a service in the cloud", Diploma Work, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2019
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.80651
We present iHome, a smart home management service in the cloud. The service addresses the need of users to monitor and control their homes remotely provided that the home devices are “smart” themselves (i.e. they can be connected to the internet and operated remotely). Home devices transmit their identifier, measurements and status to a fog node and from there to the cloud. This information becomes available to registered users in the cloud based on subscriptions (i.e. to users authorized to review and respond to this information). User access rights are defined based on user roles (i.e. cloud administrators, home moderators and residents). Besides data publication and subscription services, an innovative feature of iHome, is a rule-based event management service which forwards alerts to subscribed users for responding to critical events (i.e. incidents of fire, malfunctioning appliances at home). iHome is implemented based on principles of Service Oriented Architecture design as a composition of RESTful services for the cloud side (back-end).Because a large number of smart devices for the front-end is not available to us, we decided to rely on software simulating the operation of smart devices at homes. This allowed us to shift focus from device specific functionality (e.g. IoT transmission protocols and vendor specific device functionality), to the design and implementation of the front and back-end solutions.We run an exhaustive set of experiments using simulated (but realistic) data aiming to evaluate both, iHome response time and scalability. The results demonstrate that the system can handle up to a large number of users and data in real time.