Cost effective digitization of home appliances for home automation with low-power WiFi devices

The notion of a smart home with integrated sensors, actuators, wireless network and a graphical user interface is very enticing. This paper presents the design and implementation of reliable, flexible, secure and economical sensor network for transforming traditional home into a smart home. The heterogeneous sensor and actuator nodes based on wireless networking technologies are deployed in the home environment. These nodes communicate to a middleware which runs home automation server and which operates as broker to facilitate the MQTT connectivity protocol. The middleware facilitates controlling of wireless nodes over local as well as remote network. The proposed system is designed to be low cost and scalable to accommodate variety of devices to be controlled.