A scalable home automation IoT ecosystem using open source technologies

Home Automation provides remote access to appliances and devices in a home via the internet. While this is easily achievable on a small scale, the challenge is making the system deployable in a manner that is scalable across a whole city in a developing nation. This paper proposes an end-to-end home automation suite with modular open source components. Our backend supports multiple IoT protocols and is horizontally scalable. We implement a ‘Rules engine’ that analyzes real-time data and triggers various actions pre-determined by users. We also implement energy monitoring for judicial energy consumption in a home. Our system, when deployed, can handle data coming from homes for an entire city. Each user will have remote control of devices in his home through an android application. The user will also be able to define rules to trigger actions in his home via a web dashboard. The architecture used ensures that the system scales as the data traffic increases. Our experiments on the prototype system show low latency for real time analytics even when there are large simultaneous data streams. Our main feature contributions are the modular and dynamic nature of our system, scalability, and real time analytics for quick decision making.