Distributed rule execution for smart home system

Smart home system is one of the most popular applications and research interests in the past decade. This system can give many features such as home monitoring, appliance control, and automation system, energy-saving, and home security. A smart home system normally has a centralized architecture. This architecture gives the advantage of being easy to manage. However, the centralized architecture has a fault-tolerance problem. If the center of the system (master station) is down, then the entire system will be failed. A smart home system needs a mechanism to avoid system failure when the master station is down. Furthermore, for the big scale smart home/building system with many devices, the delay time of information transmission and processing can affect the service provision time. To solve the problem, a distributed rule execution mechanism for the smart home system is proposed in this paper. Practical experiments show that the proposed mechanism can avoid the fault-tolerance problem in the centralized smart home system. The system still provides the right services even though the master station is off. The mathematical analysis of the delay time also shows that the proposed mechanism can reduce the delay time of service provision.