A rising number of home appliances have been equipped with communication, networking and control capabilities to provide more functional and convenient living environments. Diverse user applications run on these smart devices and often require network accessibility with a home router to share a single broadband Internet access link. These home routers should be programmable in a cost-effective way to enable future evolvable smart home applications by providing quality-of-service and management interfaces to upper-layer applications.
Connectivity solutions are highly anticipated to virtualize home systems for on-demand access and easy management in a cost-effective manner to enable future evolvable smart home applications by providing quality-of-service and management interfaces to upper-layer applications. This is partly due to the Internet of Things (IoT), a massive network of all devices. The number of connected devices has been scaled at over 9 billion in 2017 and is estimated to exceed above 24 billion in the year 2020.
The Housing Learning & Improvement Network “Housing LIN” published "SMART HOME - A DEFINITION" in September 2003 introduced by Intertek in their project DTI Smart Homes. Intertek defines a smart home as “a dwelling incorporating a communications network that connects the key electrical appliances and services, and allows them to be remotely controlled, monitored or accessed”. The term remotely in this context refers to control both within and outside the smart home environment. Intertek lists three key elements that make a home “smart”:
- Internal network of wire, cable, or wireless devices
- Intelligent control from a gateway which manages the systems
- Automation to link to services and systems outside the home
Wireless Networking
We’ve developed our system firmware on top of “OpenWrt”, a set of Open- source Linux libraries for enabling networking on embedded systems. The design scope of our smart home router incorporates the latest developments in trending wireless communication technologies. IEEE 802.11 is a set of media access control (MAC) and physical (PHY) specifications for implementing a wireless local area network “WLAN” (also known today as WiFi). This technology operates in the 900 MHz and 2.4, 3.6, 5, and 60 GHz communication frequency bands. WiFi has become the most dominant networking technology of this age, with applications in computers, smart phones, and other bandwidth sensitive networking devices. WiFi technology is built on top of the IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b/g/n, and 802.11ac wireless communication standards. The current generation of WiFi “802.11ac” is a dual band wireless technology. It supports multiple connections at once and operates at the 2.4 and 5 GHz WiFi frequency bands. 802.11ac is also backward compatible with 802.11b/g/n wireless devices and supports data bandwidth rates up to 1300 Mbps when operating at 5 GHz and 450 Mbps at a 2.4 GHz frequency. Fig. 1 illustrates our proposed software-defined edge-cloud network architecture. In this architecture, our smart home router becomes the network gateway for both WiFi and BLE home systems.
IEEE 802.15.4 “Low Rate WPAN” (BLE) is designed for low data rate appli- cations to efficiently manage battery consumption. This allows battery powered sensors in a Smart Home to operate for months or even years depending on their period of activity. It is a low complexity wireless standard with specifications also on both Layer 1 (PHY) and Layer 2 (MAC). BLE is highly adopted and an anticipated solution for connecting IoT devices. The restriction of the data com- munication topology at point-to-point, limited range of communications, and the lack of IP support make it less attractive for Internet of Things applications. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group SIG standardized the Internet Protocol Support Profile “IPSP” with IPv6 support between devices over Bluetooth Low Energy “6LowPan” [2]. The next problem arises due to the short range and re- stricted topology in BLE. A mesh networking protocol for multi-hop support is needed to overcome these limitations.
To efficiently manage network traffic from an extensible number of connected IoT devices, we integrated “OpenFlow” into our smart home router. OpenFlow is an Open-source Software Defined Networking (SDN) protocol that controls the data forwarding layers of routing [10]. SDN is a systematic shift in the networking architecture where the network control forwarding rule is disabled leaving the data forwarding layers fully programmable. This change in control provides opportunities for applications at the upper layers to seize control of the underlying network allowing them to treat the network as a logical or virtual entity enabling programmability. Quality-of-Service (QoS) network control scripts can be extended onto an SDN controller and improve the multimedia delivery of an embedded OpenFlow Controller.
In this paper, we design and implement of a smart home router based on the Intel Galileo Gen 2 programmable platform. All the proposed subjects have been addressed with as much detail as possible for information purposes to encourage more research on modern technologies and to support the development of smart homes and technology for the Internet of Things. More comprehensive evalua- tion experiments remain to be accomplished on this smart home testbed. In the future, we plan to extend our study to analyze the performance of our router implementation in a smart home scenario on both “WiFi” and “BLE” interfaces using an optimized SDN protocol. In addition, it is also very important to ex- amine the performance optimization issues for high-density WiFi networks when smart home routers are co-located in the proximity [4].
This artitle is a summary of the work published in the 12th EAI International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks & Communities (TRIDENTCOM 2017) by a group in ITEC-U 2016. It is an extension of project Lion hence the name Lion 2nd Generation. Newer concepts blooming from this project have be published in other articles. More details are available at the end of the article.
