ZUMA : A Platform for Smart - Home Environments

Although electronic devices permeate the home and offer unsurpassed power and features, many impediments still exist to realizing the concept of the smart-home: configuration complexity, minimal device interoperability, difficulty of use, lack of personalization, and no integration with sensors for awareness and adaptation. We define four tenets of smart-home environment: Zero-configuration, Universality, Multi-user optimality, and Adaptability (ZUMA), and describe a platform based on a set of clean abstractions for users, content, and devices. The platform enables configuration and organization of content and networked heterogeneous devices in a smart-home environment. We validate the platform with a prototype implementation and analyze its flexibility and infrastructure requirements.