Energy Efficient Sensor Network with Service Discovery for Smart Home Environments

A communications network for sensors and actuators is an important part in the realization of any smart home or intelligent environment. This paper presents a new protocol specialized for smart home environments emphasizing energy efficiency and service discovery functionality. Energy efficiency has been attained by using device specific low power listening schemes together with minimal number of message transactions. This protocol was compared to other academic and industry protocols and found promising for use in smart home environments. Prototype implementation of the new protocol has been implemented using TinyOS, a wireless sensor network enabled operating system.