IPv6 Home Automation

Home automation is the systematic controlling and monitoring of everyday home devices such as lighting, heating, window blinds and appliances (both white goods and home electronics). This report describes how to control and monitor home appliances over IPv6 by using existing home automation hardware and an Internet connected gateway. There are many commercial home automation systems available. However, these are often proprietary and/or designed for limited use. This project seeks to pave the way for IP-enabling home appliances, making such devices part of the Internet. Therefore, these devices can individually be controlled both from within the home and remotely. Internet enabling each of these devices eliminates the need for special Internet connected control units, simplifying home automation and hopefully giving yet another incentive to deploy IPv6 on a larger scale. The practical goal of this project has been to create a virtual, but practically usable, IPv6 home automation system. This has been done using existing simple home automation hardware tied to a gateway relaying uniquely addressed IPv6 command messages to the appropriate device. This gateway's only function will be to translate IPv6 commands to whatever interface the device being controlled is using (this includes translating to and from the appropriate link and physical layers). Using this platform, new applications can be created by enabling the devices to interact without relying on a central control node. The report also describes the basic design ideas of a computer connected interface to also relay information from the home automation system to the Internet.