Failure Handling in Tuple Space Model for Smart-Home Systems

Abstract

Smart-home systems exhibit "smartness" in home automation systems for contributing to the well-being of house holders. Such systems require support of coordination of its autonomous components in order to achieve its objectives.Due to the inherent advantages of the tuple space model, it becomes the popular choice for coordination in the existing smart-home systems. However, failure resiliency in tuple space coordination has not been investigated in these systems. In fact, these systems consider stable and reliable underlying networks for correct working. Other generalized works on failure handling in the tuple space model address device/network failures with reliability and ordering assumptions, which become impractical for smart-home systems. This paper mitigates such shortcomings by proposing failure-resilient tuple space coordination for smart-home systems, which addresses both device and network failures at the same time in a realistic environment. A hierarchical system architecture is also proposed, where the failure-resilient tuple space coordination is realized. Consequently, robustness of smart-home systems has improved while maintaining system performances. Many cases of single/multiple device and network failures are thoroughly examined to validate correct working of the proposed architecture, which is further compared with its related works to substantiate its improvements.