Integrated Wireless Technologies for Smart Homes Applications

Due to the rapid advances in wireless communication and information technologies it is now possible to embed various levels of smartness in the home. These smart homes are ones that can interact intelligently with their inhibitors to provide comfort and safe living. This interaction may range from simple control of ambient temperature to context-aware and mobile agent based services. An example of that is delivery of particular information content based on the smart home inhibitor location inside the home and the activities that he or she is engaged with. Wireless networks and sensors are seen to play an increasingly important role as key enablers in emerging pervasive computing technologies that are required for the realization of smart homes. The wide spread of wireless networks in our daily life is enabled by the communication standards such as WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, RFID, and cellular technologies. A combination of these standards is envisaged to be used to construct the smart home. Effectively all wireless technologies that can support some form of remote data transfer, sensing and control are candidates for inclusion in the smart home portfolio. A top level architecture of a smart home is illustrated in Fig. 1 (Al-Qutayri & Jeedella, 2010). It includes a server/gateway/router that can be used as the central point of connectivity for devices within the home as well as allowing connectivity to the outside world. The setup also includes smart sensors as well as appliances that have either wired or wireless connectivity. Communicating with the smart home from the outside can be done using one or a combination of the following external networks such as phone lines, xDSL lines, cable TV, GSM and power line networks. Following this introduction, Section 2 reviews some of the major wireless communication technologies that can be used to realize a smart home. Section 3 describes briefly some of the smart sensors that can be used. Section 4 describes the major computing technologies, including ubiquitous and pervasive, context-aware, and agents computing which introduce smartness aspects to the home. Section 5 details some of the application that can be realized with smart homes. Section 6 describes the design and implementation of some smart home systems. In particular, the end-to-end realization of a secure system that enables monitoring and control of various devices with multiple levels of settings is described and the results 2