Mitigating Access Congestion in Smart Homes Using Multiple Access Points

The digital transformation has already resulted in extensive change in our daily life, such as the evolution of smart cities, smart offices as well as smart homes. Smart homes suddenly become a more affordable option whereby home networking and other gadgets began to appear in a reasonable price and easy to find. In other words, smart homes have an increasing demand for IoT devices in home networking connections. More connections of devices may lead to network congestion. Smart home users often face service interruptions or connectivity issues. The project sets up a smart home network with multiple access points using Raspberry Pi. The devices are categorized according to the bandwidth usage to balance the network load and the network performance is measured. PRTG monitoring tools are used to capture the ping time for each connected device. Although overall results are considered poor due to the intermittent network access, there are a few time intervals that show significant improvement. In conclusion, the latency for each smart device in a smart home network has improved significantly when connecting to a multiple AP. More APs with smart channel assignment can be developed in the future and thorough experiments can be executed.