Breaking Down the Compatibility Problem in Smart Homes: A Dynamically Updatable Gateway Platform

Abstract

Smart home is one of the most promising applications of the Internet of Things. Although there have been studies about this technology in recent years, the adoption rate of smart homes is still low. One of the largest barriers is technological fragmentation within the smart home ecosystem. Currently, there are many protocols used in a connected home, increasing the confusion of consumers when choosing a product for their house. One possible solution for this fragmentation is to make a gateway to handle the diverse protocols as a central hub in the home. However, this solution brings about another issue for manufacturers: compatibility. Because of the various smart devices on the market, supporting all possible devices in one gateway is also an enormous challenge. In this paper, we propose a software architecture for a gateway in a smart home system to solve the compatibility problem. By creating a mechanism to dynamically download and update a device profile from a server, the gateway can easily handle new devices. Moreover, the proposed gateway also supports unified control over heterogeneous networks. We implemented a prototype to prove the feasibility of the proposed gateway architecture and evaluated its performance from the viewpoint of message execution time over heterogeneous networks, as well as the latency for device profile downloads and updates, and the overhead needed for handling unknown commands.

Resistance of IoT Sensors against DDoS Attack in Smart Home Environment

“…Such a gateway is a smart-home controller. However, even in this case, manufacturer’s list compatibility, as there is a huge number of different IoT devices on the market and it is not easy to support each of them [ 32 ]. In the case study, the smart-home controller Athom Homey is used, and it is also possible in this category to include also the above-mentioned Fibaro system.…”

A Framework for Off-Line Operation of Smart and Traditional Devices of IoT Services

“…In an IoT scenario, edge computing provides computational power, secures access to the edge data, reduces latency for time-sensitive applications, supports performance in low-bandwidth environments and eases overall network congestion [ 25 ]. In this way, merging multiple end devices into a single module can significantly reduce the calculation amount of the end device, and edge computing can be implemented [ 6 , 7 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ].…”

“…In past research, edge computing was implemented to ensure the reliability in local, and the communication latency reduced [ 6 , 7 , 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. However, in these works of literature, most of them are assisted by an additional device server; this is an additional overhead to the hardware cost and should consider whether it is necessary, for example, Smart Farm, where communication of the network is poor.…”

“…Therefore, this study moves the essential functions of IoT applications to the gateway. Compared with [ 6 , 7 , 13 , 18 ] and this study, it is feasible to use the more substantial computing power of the gateway to perform edge computing to assist other end devices to compute. Then, edge devices can not only transmit data but also preprocess data and analyse real-time data, which can support edge computing and provide logic control services.…”

“…However, the huge amount of calculations involved in edge computing cannot be used in IoT devices with a low calculation capacity and storage space and large power consumption. Therefore, in a smart home, smart grid or smart city environment, the local device transmits data to the gateway via wireless communication, i.e., edge computing implemented through the computing capabilities of gateways [ 13 , 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. In addition, the introduction of boundary computing into the IoT system increases the reliability of the IoT system.…”