Home care with IoT support: Architecture design and functionality

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) technologies address many architectures and applications in the last decades. The “smart home” is one of the most popular topics in the IoT research. We consider that the scale of an IoT-oriented smart home system can go up at the aspects of residential, community and society. Resource allocation and distribution among devices, platforms and services become crucial to system reliability and performance, thus being worth of research efforts in smart home scenarios with IoT support. In this paper, we propose a reference architecture in pursuit of an IoT-based smart home system. Particularly, the home care scenario is deployed to exhibit the scenario on the proposed architecture. Our architecture reference is across front-end to back-end roles in this context, where the home gateway plays the most important role. Accordingly, we design a comprehensive functional home gateway (CFHG) which integrates combined functions of different application strategies on the middleware platform. All data in front-end sensor devices can be aggregated to gateway devices and distributed to cloud storage via web services at the back-end devices, and vice versa, control and management instructions can be issued to any indicated devices to regulate data processing operations. Finally, we make our architecture into effect with practical implementation, and present several usages regarding home care applications.