Centralized framework for controlling heterogeneous appliances in a smart home environment

The recent advancement in home automation technologies and inter-connectivity of smart appliances has contributed immensely in developing intelligent home environment. The complex smart home environment consists of smart devices from different vendors having different configuration and communication standards that introduce the problem of a heterogeneous subsystem in a smart home. A need is emerging for a central management system to control all these various devices. In this paper, we propose an action-based framework that acts as a middleware between the user and smart appliances which allow the user to control these heterogeneous devices in a federated manner. The proposed framework is based on a controller, for accepting user input and sending instructions to the intended smart devices. Framework maintains the integrity of an instruction send to the device and employs the mechanism so that only authentic user can access them. We also incorporate Human System Interaction (HSI) in our framework, by developing an Android application which receives input in the form of motion gestures, to fulfill the human-centric interaction requirements of the user to communicate with the smart home appliances. We evaluate the performance of our framework by implementing the controller in a local home network and the cloud.