Smart Home Technologies in the Cloud I. Kastelan*, M. Bjelica*, B. Mrazovac* and V. Pekovic** *
University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Technical Sciences, Novi Sad, Serbia ** RT-RK Institute for Computer Based Systems, Novi Sad, Serbia
[email protected],
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Abstract - Cloud computing is making its way towards use at home. This paper presents a cloud for smart home. We present review of technologies for smart home and give an integrated cloud-based energy- and carbon-efficient architecture. It consists of smart outlets, smart light switches and lighting, integrated network for the control of energy consumption, centralized control of the smart home, audio and video communication system, digital television and entertainment devices.
I.
INTRODUCTION
In the recent years, cloud computing has emerged as a powerful alternative model for enabling on-demand access to a shared pool of configurable computing devices. It works on a client-server basis, using web browser protocols, providing computation, software, data access and storage services. It provides server-based applications and data services to the client, with the result being presented on the client device. Various devices may log into the cloud – personal computers, mobile phones, tablets, servers, etc. According to the recent study, cloud computing can reduce the energy consumption [1]. It may also lead to massive carbon emission savings – predicted to be 85.7 million tons annually by year 2020. Cloud computing could lead to a 38 percent reduction in worldwide data center energy use by year 2020. Carbon profit may be reduced as much as 90 percent for the smallest and least efficient businesses. There are some reasonable doubts in energy efficiency of cloud computing. Baliga, Ayre, Hintor and Tucker [2] gave an analysis of energy consumption in cloud computing. They considered both public and private clouds and included energy consumption in switching and transmission as well as data processing and data storage. They showed that cloud computing can enable more energy-efficient use of computing power. However, under some circumstances cloud computing can consume more energy than conventional computing on the personal computer (PC). Zhu, Luo, Wang and Li [3] presented the principal concepts of multimedia cloud computing. They addressed cloud computing from multimedia-aware cloud and cloud-aware multimedia perspectives. To achieve a high quality of service for multimedia services, they proposed This work was partially supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, the project No. 32030, 2011.
a media-edge cloud in which storage, central processing unit and graphics processing unit provide distributed parallel processing. Even though it started as a commercial solution offering computing resources and services for renting, cloud computing is slowly making its way towards private use at home. Encouraged by the results of volunteer computing projects and the flexibility of the cloud, Cunsolo, Distefano, Puliafito and Scarpa [4] developed a computing paradigm they named Cloud@Home. They see it as a generalization knocking down the barriers of volunteer computing, as well as the enhancement of the grid-utility vision of cloud computing. Clouds mostly offer storage and multimedia services. We believe that the services cloud can offer may be extended to offer control and storage services to the smart home. In that context, we propose cloud-enhanced smart home system. We present the review of some of the current technologies used in the smart home and give a proposal for an integrated cloud-based architecture which would offer cloud services to all the mentioned technologies working together. The goal is to design a more energy- and carbon-efficient system for home use. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents the overview of the proposed home cloud. Section 3 explains cloud components in more detail – smart lighting and outlets, intelligent home networking system, smart home control system, audio and video communication system and entertainment devices. Section 4 gives some concluding remarks. II.
CLOUD OVERVIEW
Fig. 1 on the next page presents the overview of the proposed smart-home cloud model. The proposed cloud consists of the following servers: Smart lighting and electric outlets, Intelligent home networking system, Smart home control through digital TV, Audio and video communication system, Entertainment devices.
Entertainment Smart lighting Audio/Video Communication
DTV
Figure 2. Smart outlets and smart light switches Smart outlets Integrated network
Figure 1. Cloud overview
III.
Figure 3. Energy savings of smart outlets
CLOUD COMPONENTS
A. Smart Lighting and Outlets Smart lighting and outlet solutions bring additional functionality and comfort compared to standard on/off switches and potentiometers [5]. In a smart home, users can control lights using the remote control and select the desired light intensity for each light bulb. Furthermore, it is possible to program lights to be at a desired intensity at a given time in the future. The servers for smart lighting can be accessed over the internet to provide remote control even outside the home. The same can be achieved with other simple home appliances through the use of smart outlets. Cloud services for smart lighting and outlets may include storage of lighting profiles and history of device operations for devices connected to smart outlets, as well as centralized control as discussed later. Smart outlets and light switches can be turned on, switched off and dimmed up or down manually by using control interface or automatically by using patterns defined in the scripts. With a support for Zigbee and TCP protocols, the HC is able to receive the information about the electrical characteristics of the devices attached to the outlets, to process them and save the historical data to the local or remote SQL database. By using the attractive and easily accessible web UI, users are able to monitor consumption or to set up energy saving modes by choosing one of the available scripts. Smart outlets can be used to extend smart power control to home appliances other than lighting. With them, all electrical appliances within the home can have smart control and be turned on or off remotely, by a user using the application on their smartphones or computers. Fig. 2 presents an example of smart outlets and smart light switches used in the smart home. Fig. 3 presents the achieved energy savings in the experimental house (160m²) with lights “eco mode” started. [5] The test was performed during two working days in the house with four-member family (two adults, two kids).
B. Intelligent Home Networking System An intelligent home networking system [6] provides monitoring and controlling of residential energy. It consists of wirelessly-controlled smart power extension cords, remote controllers, wireless PIR sensors and home energy controller. The system is based on ZigBee 2.4 GHz wireless network protocol and is easily configured and managed as a residential smart grid. This system can be integrated in the cloud which would offer storage of energy consumption in the home and control for wirelessly-controlled home devices. In such way the system will be able to follow energy consumption in realtime and share the data with a smart meter installed in the home. There are initiatives [7] to connect smart meters at national level and use secured cloud for storing energy usage of each home. Contrary to this macro level, the intelligent home networking system provides the micro smart grid option, supporting further energy savings reported in [1]. Fig. 4 presents an overview of the intelligent home networking system. C. Smart Home Control Digital television and set-top boxes can be extended to provide control over home appliances in a smart home. References [8]-[9] provide examples of such systems. Remote control which was used to control television set or set-top box can now be used to control all home appliances. Intelligence and awareness is achieved with a support for execution of recipes - prepared scripts that define timely actions and respond to triggers obtained from sensors. The main aim is to allow the interaction between interactive TV applications and the controllers of the in-home appliances in a natural way. This unit would offer centralized control for the whole cloud. Cloud may also offer storage services for digital TV and other multimedia data available in a home.
Figure 5. The prototype of the back side of the proposed videophone device Microphone array
Microphone array handler
Video decoding Panel
Video encoding TV engine
Speakers
TV Set
USB HDMI
Camera Audio codec Proposed system
LAN/WLAN
Figure 6. System overview
Figure 4. Intelligent home networking system
D. Audio and Video Communication System An integrated audio and video communication system can be connected to the cloud to add full-duplex handsfree videophone functionality in the smart home [10]. It consists of a digital camera and microphone array which are connected to the TV set through the High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI). It provides excellent sound quality via TV loudspeakers and simultaneous watch of the TV broadcast. Microphone array allows for suppression of the existing sound from the TV broadcast. Storage of the history of audio/video communications can be offered by the cloud as well as access to the unified contact list. The audio and video communication system has the following main hardware components:
central processing module,
digital camera for video input,
microphone array for audio input,
remote controller with voice-call interface,
support for typing text messages.
The main software components of this add-on device are:
video decoding,
On-Screen Display videophone,
remote control handling,
display control,
sound control.
(OSD)
support
for
Fig. 5 presents the prototype of the back side of the audio and video communication system. Fig. 6 shows the overview of the system. The main hardware/software components of the system are highlighted. The device is connected to the TV set via USB interface. TV set connects to the panel, speakers and network interface - Local Area Network (LAN) and Wireless LAN (WLAN). Camera and microphone array send input data to the proposed system for processing. E. Entertainment Entertainment devices can also be incorporated in a cloud as the storage needs for games increases at a high rate. User awareness kit [11] can be used as an add-on device with a variety of consumer electronics devices. As a result, host device would be able to anticipate user actions and adapt accordingly. It combines sensor inputs (passive infrared sensor, microphone array, time of flight camera) with behavior models based on system attentiveness and user-system interference concepts, to provide information about the users to its host. Gaming devices can be added to the cloud through PC or a console connected to the digital TV set and gaming experience can be improved with the use of the aforementioned user awareness kit and gaming accessories. IV.
CONCLUSIONS
This paper presented a review of cloud-enhanced smart home technologies. The proposed cloud covers basic requirements of a smart home – smart lighting and outlets, intelligent network, digital television, audio and video communication and entertainment. Servers for each of these applications work in a cloud environment, therefore saving energy and providing a more ecologicalfriendly solution.
Many households are already equipped with flat screen TV receivers and users are ready to try new products. The Internet-connected TVs started to take off in TV markets beginning of 2010, and there is no doubt that soon every TV that ships will have a built-in Wi-Fi, webcams and microphones. Cloud is just beginning to enter private use in homes and provides an efficient alternative to integration of all technologies in a smart home. The future work will consist of adapting the mentioned system for optimal performance in the cloud environment as well as designing new systems which will connect to the same cloud with the goal of integrating the whole smart home in the cloud. The future development of the proposed systems in the cloud aims to grow them into competitive products in the respective markets. REFERENCES [1]
[2]
[3]
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V.D. Cunsolo, S. Distefano, A. Puliafito, M. Scarpa: “Volunteer Computing and Desktop Cloud: The Cloud@Home Paradigm”, Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications (NCA), 2009, pp. 134-139 [5] B. Mrazovac, V. Nuhijevic, M. Bjelica, N. Teslic. I. Papp: “Towards Ubiquitous Smart Outlets for Safety and Energetic Efficiency of Home Electric Appliances“, 1stIEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin), 2011, in press [6] V. Nuhijevic, S. Vukosavljev, B. Radin, N. Teslic, M. Vucelja: “An Intelligent Home Networking System”, 1st International Conference on Consumer Electronics – Berlin (ICCE-Berlin), 2011, in press [7] IBM and Cable&Wireless Worldwide Announce UK Smart Energy Cloud, LONDON, March 21, 2011 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/, www.prnewswire.com (accessed on 2011-08-04) [8] M.Z. Bjelica, I. Papp, N. Teslic, J.-M. Coulon: “Set-top box-based home controller”, 14th IEEE International Symposium on Consumer Electronics (ISCE), 2010, pp. 1-6 [9] M.R. Cabrer, R.P. Diaz Redondo, A.F. Vilas, J.J.P. Arias, J.G. Duque: “Controlling the smart home from TV”, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics,2006, Vol. 52, Issue 2, pp. 421-429 [10] I. Kastelan, M. Katona, I. Papp, M. Davidovic, I. Resetar: “A FullDuplex Hands-Free Videophone Add-on Device for Digital Television Sets”, 1st International Conference on Consumer Electronics – Berlin (ICCE-Berlin), 2011, in press [11] M.Z. Bjelica, N. Teslic: “Multi-purpose user awareness kit for consumer electronic devices”, Digest of Technical Papers. International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE), 2010, pp. 239-240 [4]
