A Data-Centric Cognitive Gateway with Distributed MIMO for Future Smart Homes

Gateways play very important roles in smart homes. With gateways that can effectively separate applications and physical devices, the smart home architecture can be simplified. In the future, when more and more wireless devices are deployed in smart homes, gateways are facing critical challenges to accommodate the variety and heterogeneity of devices while maintaining enough simplicity, full interoperability, high energy and spectrum efficiency, and uncompromised system security. In this article, we first study the-state-of-the-art techniques and solutions for smart home infrastructure and present both their advantages and disadvantages. Then we propose a data-centric cognitive gateway, which is simple, efficient, and secure for smart homes. In addition, we investigate the trade-off among deployment cost, routine maintenance overhead, and system security. Our experiments verify the efficiency of our proposed solutions.