Fast-prototyping Approach to Design and Validate Architectures for Smart Home

The Internet of Things has contributed to make smarter houses and buildings in the last decades. Different existing works already integrate IoT technologies in homes, but end-user needs continuously change and researchers must face this challenge in identifying platforms to fast prototype solutions satisfying these new needs. This paper presents a solution that demonstrates how well-known fast-prototyping technologies like Node-RED, IBM Watson, Telegram, Raspberry Pi 4, and secured MQTT can contribute to develop complex systems facing the challenge. The selected tools are used within a smart home context to support features inspired by people needs and allow users to: a) consult real time conditions (i.e., temperature, humidity, gas), b) remotely manage lights, c) save energy through a light management system based on user movements, d) remotely monitor the house through dedicated webcams, e) generate warning notifications in case of danger. Users can interact with the systems through a web Node-RED dashboard and a Telegram bot. Differently from existing works, the feasibility of the implemented system and the efficacy of the exploited platforms are demonstrated through a running scenario extracted from a consolidated study on user needs in smart homes. The performed experiment can facilitate the fast prototyping of new solutions

Rapid prototyping of IoT applications with Esperanto compiler

Integrating various networked devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) enables various new services like home automation, making its market larger and more competitive. Although rapid development of an IoT application is crucial to keep up with the highly competitive IoT market, developing an IoT application is challenging for programmers because the programmers should integrate multiple programmable devices and heterogeneous third-party devices. Some IoT frameworks integrate programming environments of multiple devices, but they either require device-specific implementation for third- party devices without any device abstraction, or abstract all the devices to the standard interfaces requiring unnecessary abstraction of programmable devices. This work introduces the Esperanto framework that integrates IoT devices with selective abstraction, allowing rapid prototyping of an IoT application. Exploiting the correspondence between an object and a thing in the object oriented programming (OOP) model, the Esperanto framework allows programmers to write only one OOP program instead of multiple programs for each device, and to manipulate third-party devices with their common ancestor classes. Compared to an existing approach on the integrated IoT programming, Esperanto requires 33.3% fewer lines of code to implement 5 IoT services, and reduces their response time by 44.8% on average. Moreover, with an empirical study, this work shows that the Esperanto framework reduces the development time by 52.7%.1