IoT Delegate: Smart Home Framework for Heterogeneous IoT Service Collaboration

With Internet of Things (IoT) technology, home environment becomes smarter than ever. Not only smart devices such as smart phone or smart TV, but also various IoT devices including sensor, smart thermostat, and smart scale has now become very common on the market. These devices have connectivity to the Internet, so that user can read data from the device or control the device using Internet technology. However, due to diversity of smart home requirements, device collaboration in smart home remains a challenging task still. Usually smart home is built with various technologies to fulfill its own purpose, and these purposes cover very wide area from controlling low-power sensor devices to controlling high-performance devices like smart TV and smart phone. This variety of smart home requirements makes smart home very complicated due to mixed network architecture, protocol and technology. In this paper, a framework to enable managing and collaborating heterogeneous IoT devices in smart home environment is proposed. Several programming models are defined in the proposed framework to make application development for heterogeneous devices more intuitive. The proposed framework has been implemented as a web service, and a case study with real-world smart home IoT devices is presented.