Examining the Reusability of Smart Home Applications: A Case Study on Eclipse Smart Home

Abstract

Smart Homes consist of a plethora of IoT devices most of which developed by different manufacturers. To handle the diversity of IoT devices within the context of Smart Home automation, literature has suggested the use of frameworks. In this paper we argue that developers can benefit from such frameworks as a solution to build flexible and easily extendable systems by reusing their components. For this purpose, we explore the reuse opportunities that can be offered by Eclipse Smart Home (ESH) framework. In particular, we performed a case study and analyzed 107 packages from the ESH framework that offered 240 reusable components to the OpenHab application. We investigated (a) which types of functionality are mostly facilitated for reuse (b) which types of reuse are mostly adopted and what is the integration effort required (c) what is the quality of the reused components and compared them to the components built from scratch. The results of the case study suggest that: the main functionality reused is the one related to Interface Adapters and the main type of reuse is Variable Type. Regarding the effort for integrating the reused components it can range from 38 lines of code to 1421 lines of code. Moreover, the quality of the reused components is slightly improved compared to the rest of the components built from scratch.