My Home is My Bazaar - A Taxonomy and Classification of Current Wireless Home Network Protocols

Recent advances in wireless communication have produced a multitude of related protocols, leading to a growing market of products for home automation systems within energy management, elder care, etc. These systems are different from wired ones in terms of architectures and qualities, which leads to considerable challenges for developers and integrators in understanding and choosing between the available wireless technologies. To further increase technology adoption and improve business risk assessments, it is necessary to determine the important properties of the technologies in order to compare them. First, we review the technical details of a number of established wireless technologies currently sold in the market. Second, a taxonomy is constructed based on the ISO 9126 quality framework. A number of evaluation criteria are determined such as maturity, replace ability, openness, resource efficiency, cost, security, etc. Third, a classification based on the taxonomy and the collected data is presented. In the final discussion, we identify a number of key aspects that could be important technology criteria for future development of home automation protocols.