Smart home technologies refer to devices that provide some degree of digitally connected, automated, or enhanced services to building occupants. Smart homes have become central in recent technology ...and policy discussions about energy efficiency, climate change, and the sustainability of buildings. Nevertheless, do they truly promote sustainability goals? In addition, what sorts of benefits, risks, and policies do they entail? Based on an extensive original dataset involving expert interviews, site visits to retailers, and a comprehensive review of the literature, this study critically examines the promise and peril of smart home technologies. Drawing on original data collected in the United Kingdom, which has access to European markets, the study first examines definitions of smart homes before offering a new classification involving 13 categories of smart technology covering 267 specific options commercially available from 113 companies. It situates these different technology classes alongside six degrees or levels of smartness, from the basic or traditional home to the fully automated and sentient home. It then elaborates on the 13 distinct benefits smart homes may offer alongside potential 17 risks and barriers, before introducing seven policy recommendations from the material. It lastly suggests three areas of future research on the demographics and behavior of actual smart home adopters, rethinking the duality of “control,” and looking beyond “homes” towards socio-technical systems, practices, and justice.
•Examines definitions of smart homes and classifies 13 categories of technology covering 267 specific options.•Situates smart homes among six degrees or levels of smartness, from basic to automated and sentient homes.•Elaborates on 13 distinct potential benefits smart homes.•Identifies 17 risks and barriers to smart homes and 7 policy recommendations.•Suggests future research areas on adopters, control, and socio-technical systems, practices, and justice.
Edge Computing: Vision and Challenges Shi, Weisong; Cao, Jie; Zhang, Quan ...
IEEE internet of things journal,
10/2016, Letnik:
3, Številka:
5
Journal Article
The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) and the success of rich cloud services have pushed the horizon of a new computing paradigm, edge computing, which calls for processing the data at the ...edge of the network. Edge computing has the potential to address the concerns of response time requirement, battery life constraint, bandwidth cost saving, as well as data safety and privacy. In this paper, we introduce the definition of edge computing, followed by several case studies, ranging from cloud offloading to smart home and city, as well as collaborative edge to materialize the concept of edge computing. Finally, we present several challenges and opportunities in the field of edge computing, and hope this paper will gain attention from the community and inspire more research in this direction.
Optimizing the power demand for smart home appliances in a smart grid is the primary challenge faced by power supplier companies, particularly during peak periods, due to its considerable effect on ...the stability of a power system. Therefore, power supplier companies have introduced dynamic pricing schemes that provide different prices for a time horizon in which electricity prices are higher during peak periods due to the high power demand and lower during off-peak periods. The problem of scheduling smart home appliances at appropriate periods in a predefined time horizon in accordance with a dynamic pricing scheme is called power scheduling problem in a smart home (PSPSH). The primary objectives in addressing PSPSH are to reduce the electricity bill of users and maintain the stability of a power system by reducing the ratio of the highest power demand to the average power demand, known as the peak-to-average ratio, and to improve user comfort level by reducing the waiting time for appliances. In this paper, we review the most pertinent studies on optimization methods that address PSPSH. The reviewed studies are classified into exact algorithms and metaheuristic algorithms. The latter is categorized into single-based, population-based, and hybrid metaheuristic algorithms. Accordingly, a critical analysis of state-of-the-art methods are provided and possible future directions are also discussed.
•Smart grid and smart home are defined and illustrated.•The smart home system is modeled and described.•A comprehensive definition of power scheduling problems in smart home and datasets used in most of the literature are discussed.•Demand response programs are discussed.•The optimization methods that adapted to handle PSPSH are summarized to show their objectives, contributions, and gaps.
In the actual era of smart homes and smart grids, advanced technological systems that allow the automation of domestic tasks are developing rapidly. There are numerous technologies and applications ...that can be installed in smart homes today. They enable communication between home appliances and users, and enhance home appliances’ automation, monitoring and remote control capabilities. This review article, by introducing the concept of the smart home and the advent of the smart grid, investigates technologies for smart homes. The technical descriptions of the systems are presented and point out advantages and disadvantages of each technology and product today available on the market. Barriers, challenges, benefits and future trends regarding the technologies and the role of users have also been discussed.
Smart Home Personal Assistants Edu, Jide S; Such, Jose M; Suarez-Tangil, Guillermo
ACM computing surveys,
11/2021, Letnik:
53, Številka:
6
Journal Article
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Smart Home Personal Assistants (SPA) are an emerging innovation that is changing the means by which home users interact with technology. However, several elements expose these systems to various ...risks: (i) the open nature of the voice channel they use, (ii) the complexity of their architecture, (iii) the AI features they rely on, and (iv) their use of a wide range of underlying technologies. This article presents an in-depth review of SPA's security and privacy issues, categorizing the most important attack vectors and their countermeasures. Based on this, we discuss open research challenges that can help steer the community to tackle and address current security and privacy issues in SPA. One of our key findings is that even though the attack surface of SPA is conspicuously broad and there has been a significant amount of recent research efforts in this area, research has so far focused on a small part of the attack surface, particularly on issues related to the interaction between the user and the SPA devices. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to conduct such a comprehensive review and characterization of the security and privacy issues and countermeasures of SPA.
Smart home energy management (SHEM) systems can introduce adjustments in the working period and operations of home appliances to allow for energy cost savings, which can however affect the quality of ...experience (QoE) perceived by the user. This paper analyses this issue and proposes a QoE-aware SHEM system, which relies on the knowledge of the annoyance suffered by users when the operations of appliances are changed with respect to the ideal user's preferences. Accordingly, a number of profiles describing different usages are created in the design phase. At the deployment stage, users behavior and annoyance are registered to assign one of these profiles per appliance. The assigned profile is then exploited by the QoE-aware cost saving appliance scheduling and the QoE-aware renewable source power allocation algorithms. The former is aimed at scheduling controlled loads based on users profile preferences and electricity prices. The latter re-allocates appliances' operations whenever a surplus of energy is available by renewable energy sources. Experimental results demonstrate that the annoyance perceived by users is severely diminished with respect to a QoE-unaware strategy, at the expenses of only a limited reduction in energy saving.
In recent years, Blockchain has attracted tremendous attention due to its salient features including auditability, immutability, security, and anonymity. Resulting from these salient features, ...blockchain has been applied in multiple non-monetary applications including the Internet of Things (IoT). However, blockchain is computationally expensive, has limited scalability and incurs significant bandwidth overheads and delays which are not suited for most IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a Lightweight Scalable blockchain (LSB) that is optimized for IoT requirements while also providing end-to-end security. Our blockchain instantiation achieves decentralization by forming an overlay network where high resource devices jointly manage the blockchain. The overlay is organized as distinct clusters to reduce overheads and the cluster heads are responsible for managing the public blockchain. We propose a Distributed Time-based Consensus algorithm (DTC) which reduces the mining processing overhead and delay. Distributed trust approach is employed by the cluster heads to progressively reduce the processing overhead for verifying new blocks. LSB incorporates a Distributed Throughput Management (DTM) algorithm which ensures that the blockchain throughput does not significantly deviate from the cumulative transaction load in the network. We explore our approach in a smart home setting as a representative example for broader IoT applications. Qualitative arguments demonstrate that our approach is resilient to several security attacks. Extensive simulations show that packet overhead and delay are decreased and blockchain scalability is increased compared to relevant baselines.
•Lightweight scalable blockchain optimized for low-resource IoT devices.•Achieves self-scaling by using distributed throughput management algorithm.•Nodes build trust on each other to reduce processing overheads for verifying blocks.•Introduces low-resource consuming distributed time-based consensus algorithm.
With the exponential development of the Internet of Things (IoTs), big data, and artificial intelligence (AI), smart home technologies have become crucial to people's lives and the construction of ...smart cities, driving an increasing demand for distributed sensors. In this work, we have for the first time successfully fabricated smart ceramic tiles (SCTs) that integrate electrodes with ceramic tiles using a layer-by-layer temperature gradient sintering method. These SCTs, which are based on triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) technology, not only demonstrate high sensitivity and good stability, but also offer the potential for high concealment by adjusting glaze composition and color. Under various motion triggers, the SCTs produced high-discrimination electrical output signals, which proves their potential in behavior recognition. Extreme environmental tests further confirmed the SCTs' superior responsiveness. A wireless security monitoring system for SCT sensing, which was developed using IoT chips, enables remote monitoring via mobile devices. This study not only demonstrates the commercial feasibility of SCTs but also highlights their immense potential for imperceptible monitoring within the smart home domain.
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•Successfully prepared intelligent ceramic tiles using gradient temperature sintering process.•SCTs have high sensitivity, stability, and concealment.•SCTs can be used for wireless monitoring in smart homes.
Today, 44% of global energy has been derived from fossil fuel, which currently poses a threat to inhabitants and well-being of the environment. In a recent investigation of the global demand for ...energy consumption across various energy consumption sectors, the building sector has been shown to be one of the primary energy consumers, with a high percentage of energy consumption deemed as unnecessary. This as a result of poor management practice and implementation of strategies to avoid excess energy consumption. Over the years, researchers in both academia and industries have focused on various techniques to deal with unnecessary energy consumption and ensuring a healthy living environment for green smart cities. Among these techniques is Smart Home Energy Management Systems (SHEMs), which transform electric home appliances, sensor nodes, into autonomous devices in order to manage energy consumption effectively. This study presents an analysis of smart home energy management system with the goal to identify current trends and challenges for future improvement. The result reveals lack of quality attributes such as security, privacy, scalability, interoperability, and difficulty in managing and adapt to the thermal comfort satisfaction of residents, exposing them to health risks. Lastly, the study described opportunities for future research that ensure energy-efficient smart homes free of unnecessary energy consumption, health challenges, and cyber security attacks.
•In this work, we study Smart Home Energy Management Systems.•Researchers have focused on how to deal with unnecessary energy consumption.•This study explores the top 10 SHEMs available in the market today.•The result reveals a lack of quality attributes such as security and privacy.•This study review analysis on smart home energy management.
The emergence of the smart home has fundamentally changed the quality of human living owing to its usefulness and convenience. However, it still has some serious problems that mainly lie in its ...relational database security. The data storage of a smart home cannot meet the security requirements of its residents. To strengthen its security, blockchain technology is applied to the data storage and data connection, being embodied in the data storage model in smart homes based on blockchains under multiple cloud providers. However, the model still has weaknesses due to its limited blockchain transaction storage space and the current speed of addressing blockchain storage transactions. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an identity-based proxy aggregate signature (IBPAS) scheme to improve the efficiency of signature verification, as well as compress the storage space and reduce the communication bandwidth. According to our experiments, although the communication cost of our IBPAS scheme accounts for only 12% to 39% of that of an ordinary signature scheme, its storage performance in a blockchain is better than that of the blockchain itself by 20%.
•The data storage model in smart home based on blockchain under multiple cloud providers is proposed.•An identity-based proxy aggregate signature is proposed to improve the efficiency of signature verification.•Besides, the signature can compress transaction storage space and reduce communication bandwidth.
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