Trends in home automation systems and protocols

Contemporary Home Automation Systems have become very popular to the end-user as they provide them easy and convenient ways to control their home and their appliances with the use of a networking device such as a PC, tablet or a Smartphone. The market provides a plethora of home automation protocols and technologies, with the end user having a difficult decision as to which of these is the most appropriate. Unfortunately, such a decision is a complex, time- consuming task, as technology solutions are changing over the years. The existing standards and protocols do not provide always enough information for the extraction of the appropriate metrics for comparing their technical characteristics and capabilities. This paper is an effort to present a complete information set about the most popular home automation protocols and technologies including standardized, proprietary and open source implementations. In addition, an approach from the end user's perspective is given, by providing critical details for administrators about their management and configuration procedures. Finally, the last section of this paper presents for each protocol its realization according to the OSI 7-layer model, in an effort to extract their common characteristics and differentiations.