iHome: Smart Home Management as a Service in the Cloud and the Fog

Abstract

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. To mitigate concerns in regards to data protection, communication delays in delivering large amounts of data to the cloud, all services for the home are realized within a fog node installed at home. 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.