A Modular Approach for Smart Home System Architectures Based on Android Applications

Abstract

European market size for smart home systems is expected to grow by 20% to over 4.3 billion USD by 2017. This growth is mainly due to the development of luxury and premium markets towards a mass market. In 2014, more than one billion mobile devices with Google's operating system Android were sold, which resulted in a market share of more than 80%. Thus, mobile devices have already reached the mass market. The main idea behind this work is the reuse of mobile devices as smart home systems to reduce market entry barrier for end users and to contribute to a more holistic use of mobile devices. Therefore, we developed a modular architecture concept for smart home systems based on Android devices. In order to ensure the usefulness of this concept, the characteristics of existing systems and the potential of mobile devices were taken into account. Our primary goal was the development of a generic software architecture for various smart home applications. Therefore, we present a plugin framework concept that allows modular system design. Our framework is implemented by using components without modifying the Android operating system itself.