Design and implementation of a power consumption management system for smart home over fog-cloud computing

Smart home becomes a part of the trend in a vast Internet of Things (IoT) field. However, according to International Data Corporation, IDC, every house generated 2 TB amount of data on average by 2014, and this number is estimated to rise up to 10 TB by 2020. With a huge amount of data, cloud-only architecture could not keep up with the volume and velocity of this data across the network. Therefore, we provide the reference architecture for smart home which is based on fog computing using Zigbee protocol. We can treat fog computing as the extension of the cloud. It can ease a load of cloud, improve its performance and efficiency, and also provide real-time calculating service. Furthermore, the cloud can provide insight and configuration to fog computing architecture to enhance the home-automated function and optimize system intelligent. Our approach can effectively address the data amount issues and reduce the response latency to secure the safety for the family member in real-time processing needed situation, and monitor the usage of electricity for each member to implement the home energy management system. Each home fog network can communicate with each other and become a bigger architecture for the smart city in the future.