Designing Highly Available Repositories for Heterogeneous Sensor Data in Open Home Automation Systems

Smart home applications are currently implemented by vendor-specific systems managing mainly a few number of homogeneous sensors and actuators. However, the sharp increase of the number of intelligent devices in a house and the foreseen explosion of the smart home application market will change completely this vendor centric scenario towards open, expandable systems made up of a large number of cheap heterogeneous devices. As a matter of fact, new smart home solutions have to be able to taklewith scalability, dynamicity and heterogeneity requirements. In this paper we present the architecture of a basic building block, namely a distributed repository service, for smart home systems. The repository stores data from heterogeneous devices deployed in the house that can be then retrieved by context aware applications implementing some home automation functionalities. Our architecture, based on a DHT, offers a completely decentralized and reliable storage service able to offer complex query functionalities. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2009.