Towards a scalable cloud enabled smart home automation architecture for demand response

Abstract

As smart homes and smart grids become ubiquitous their interactions will become crucial for optimizing energy consumption at large scale at residential level. Scalable solutions will be required to enable fast and reliable control during demand response. While management solutions have been proposed they do not focus on the scalability issues of the processing system. Handling continuous and variable Big Data streams can easily saturate existing systems. In this paper we propose a scalable cloud based architecture and prototype system for handling smart home data flows. The system can support near real time decisions for 10,000 customers each having 10 sensors with only 35 commodity machines running free cloud software. The platform is automated and can be used to directly control the customers' smart home or to send recommendations. Some initial experiments are performed to show the benefits of smart recommendations.