Mobile agent based integrated control architecture for home automation system

The architecture of the conventional home automation system is usually centralized and thus causes many problems, e.g. lots of network traffic, heavy computation load, and poor fault tolerance. Another problem with the architecture is that there exists a variety of different home control networks incompatible with one another, which makes it difficult to integrate them in order to provide high level management functions in a home automation system. Besides the problems mentioned above, the most serious problem with a home automation system is its dynamically changing environment. Such frequently changing situation of the peripherals disallows straightforward configuration and maintenance of the home automation system. In this paper, we propose a mobile agent based integrated control architecture for home automation system, which is able to solve the problem mentioned above. This architecture is a distributed one, reducing the network traffic and computation load by delegating the management function to each control node. To integrate various kinds of home control network, we use computer network as the backbone and apply the concept of gateway to facilitate different networks to communicate with one another. Finally, we take advantages of the characteristics of mobile agent to cope with the problem of the dynamic environment and to enhance the fault tolerance mechanism.