Research and design of Cloud architecture for smart home

Cloud Computing is a recent technology trend whose aim is to deliver computing utilities as Internet services. Many companies have already offered successful commercial Cloud services including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. But those services are all computer-based and designed for Web browsers. Currently there is no Cloud architecture whose purpose is to provide special services for digital appliances in smart home. In this paper, we propose an additional Model, the smart home Cloud, which not only bases on the present Cloud architecture but also modifies the traditional Service layer to provide efficient and stable services for smart home. In contrast to the traditional Model, we bring Web service and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technologies to the Cloud. Smart home nodes and Cloud server form a peer-to-peer network, which can help the Cloud server to reduce bandwidth pressure when transmitting higher quality audio/video signals. Smart home gateway describes their services in WSDL and registers them to the Cloud service directory so that other homes can search and consume the service. Peers (smart home) are both suppliers and consumers of services.