Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 140, Part 3, 1 January 2017, Pages 1454-1464
Journal of Cleaner Production

Review
A review of Internet of Things for smart home: Challenges and solutions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A review of state-of-the-art Internet of Things applications for smart grid and home.

  • Definition of smart home holistic framework with key features from literature review.

  • General description of a smart home management model based on the holistic framework.

  • Discussion of current and future challenges for Internet of Things based solutions.

Abstract

Although Internet of Things (IoT) brings significant advantages over traditional communication technologies for smart grid and smart home applications, these implementations are still very rare. Relying on a comprehensive literature review, this paper aims to contribute towards narrowing the gap between the existing state-of-the-art smart home applications and the prospect of their integration into an IoT enabled environment. We propose a holistic framework which incorporates different components from IoT architectures/frameworks proposed in the literature, in order to efficiently integrate smart home objects in a cloud-centric IoT based solution. We identify a smart home management model for the proposed framework and the main tasks that should be performed at each level. We additionally discuss practical design challenges with emphasis on data processing, as well as smart home communication protocols and their interoperability. We believe that the holistic framework ascertained in this paper can be used as a solid base for the future developers of Internet of Things based smart home solutions.

Introduction

With the expected growth in world population, the demand for energy will continuously increase. Current power grids were built decades ago, and despite the fact that they are regularly upgraded, their capability to fulfill future demands is uncertain. Existing reserves of fossil fuels are limited and impose harmful emissions, making social and environmental implications and impact inevitable. The result of this current state is the transition of the traditional centralized grid towards a distributed hybrid energy generation system that heavily relies on renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar systems (Lund et al., 2015), biomass, fuel cells, and tidal power.

Smart grid is a concept that integrates information and communication technologies (ICT) with grid power systems, in order to achieve efficient and intelligent energy generation and consumption (Iyer and Agrawal, 2010). It is characterized by a two-way flow of both electricity and information. Approaches in smart grid include novel solutions that would effectively exploit the existing power grid in order to reduce or eliminate blackouts, voltage sags and overloads. Utilities could benefit, as the load demand in critical situations would decrease. If demand is greater than the total generation, these systems could prevent the grid failure or major blackouts, and increase the reliability, quality, security and safety of the power grid.

Smart grid solutions can be applied in every part of the grid: production, transmission and distribution. Recently, a fourth part of the smart grid, i.e. the smart home has become a major (mainstream) research and application interest in smart grid. Smart home refers to the use of ICT in home control, ranging from controlling appliances to automation of home features (windows, lighting, etc.). A key element of the smart home is the usage of intelligent power scheduling algorithms, which will provide residents with the ability to make optimal, a priori choices about how to spent electricity in order to decrease energy consumption. Another term commonly used is smart house or home automation.

The combination of information technologies and advanced communication and sensing systems, creates a variety of new potential applications. New advanced concepts, such as pervasive or ubiquitous computing (Greenfield, 2006), where computing is made to appear everywhere and anywhere, hold a huge potential for application in smart grid (Parikh et al., 2010). Smart devices or objects, capable of communication and computation, ranging from simple sensor nodes to home appliances and sophisticated smart phones are present everywhere around us. The heterogeneous network composing of such objects comes under the umbrella of a concept with a fast growing popularity, referred to as Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT represents a worldwide network of uniquely addressable interconnected objects. According to Gubbi et al. (2013), IoT is an “interconnection of sensing and actuating devices providing the ability to share information across platforms through a unified framework, developing a common operating picture for enabling innovative applications. This is achieved by seamless ubiquitous sensing, data analytics and information representation with Cloud computing as the unifying framework.” Therefore, the Internet of Things aims to improve one's comfort and efficiency, by enabling cooperation among smart objects.

The standard IoT usually consists of many Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices. Wireless Sensor Network is a paradigm that was tremendously explored by the research community in the last two decades (Oppermann et al., 2014). A WSN consists of smart sensing devices that can communicate through direct radio communication. RFID devices are not as sophisticated. They mainly consist of two parts: an integrated circuit with some computational capabilities and an antenna for communication.

The concept of IoT, combined with smart metering, has the potential to transform residential houses, homes and offices into energy-aware environments. There is an increasing interest in the research community to incorporate the IoT paradigm in the smart grid concept, particularly in smart home solutions. The trends of web search popularity for the terms: Internet of Things, Smart Grid and Smart Home since 2004 are shown in Fig. 1. According to these statistics by Google, the trends will further increase for the terms Internet of Things and Smart Home.

In this paper, we present a holistic approach to the integration of state-of-the-art IoT (or near IoT) solutions into the smart home, taking into account both home energy management considerations and architectural challenges and solutions with emphasis on data processing issues, networking and interoperability features of smart home protocols. For this purpose, we surveyed the IoT frameworks present in the literature, analyzed these state-of-the-art solutions and defined challenges for future research. Section two presents the methodology used in this paper in order to select the most appropriate recent developments as published in the literature covering the topics of Internet of Things, smart grid, and smart home. The in-depth analysis of the results, as identified by our methodology, is given in Section 3. Our analysis is conducted in a threefold manner. Initially, possible and existing IoT and near IoT applications are analyzed in view of different parts of the smart grid where such solutions are and/or can be applied, with focus on the smart home. Afterwards, a generalization is given of the existing solutions in a new generic holistic framework that incorporates key features from the literature review as identified by our methodology. The analysis is concluded by overviewing a general smart home management model for the IoT based holistic framework by defining its integral levels and their main tasks as observed in the analyzed state-of-the-art solutions. The fourth section discusses challenges associated with IoT constrained resources (energy, memory capacity and processing capabilities), along with networking, interoperability issues, big data analyses, security and privacy. An overview of useful guidelines and solutions needed to face these challenges is given. Finally, this paper is concluded in the fifth section.

Section snippets

Review methodology

This section presents the methodology used in the paper in order to select the most appropriate recent developments as published in the literature covering the topics of Internet of Things, smart grid, and smart home. The literature was searched using the online service Google Scholar (GS) (https://scholar.google.com/). The main advantages of using GS as opposed to other similar resources like Scopus and Web of Science are freedom, ease of use, and a broader universe of cited and citing items (

In-depth analysis of literature

This section presents the in-depth analysis of the results as identified by our methodology. The analysis is conducted in a threefold manner. Initially, possible and existing IoT and near IoT applications are analyzed in view of different parts of the smart grid where such solutions are and/or can be applied, with focus on the smart home. Afterwards, a generalization is given of the existing solutions in a new generic holistic framework that incorporates key features from the literature review

Challenges and solutions

In this section, some guidelines for future developers of IoT solutions on how to make good choices when dealing with different challenges associated with practical issues are presented.

Conclusions

This paper addresses the vision that the residential buildings would shift themselves toward modern households that would be an evolution of the passive household. They would have their own solar panels and small wind turbines to produce their own energy, thus they would be able to buy/sell energy from/to the smart power grid. As it is expected for smart objects to become omnipresent on the market and respectively in consumers' households within the next few years, the need for IoT-based

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