IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - November/December 2021 - 73

Figure 6. Camera before and after inclusion.
Figure 5. Weather and camera device
representation in the smart home application.
home hub sends the command to the smart
home cloud for further processing. The cloud
adapter converts these commands into the format
required by the surveillance platform API
and sends them for execution.
On the other hand, relevant camera configuration
changes and movement detection are
reported by the surveillance platform, by posting
on the HTTPS route exposed by the smart home
cloud. These reports are then converted to
MQTT messages by the cloud adapter, and sent
to the hub. The information about the reported
changes is presented to the user, and can serve
as the trigger for different automation rules.
DEMONSTRATION AND DISCUSSION
In our test setup, the smart home cloud with
the implemented adapters is deployed to the virtual
machine with two CPUs and 8 GB of memory.
The integrated virtual weather device and the
camera are represented in the smart home application
in the form similar to other devices, as can
be seen in Figure 5. On the left side are the
weather device and the camera, whereas the bulb
and the motion sensor are on the right. From user
perspective, there is no difference between the
newly integrated devices and already supported
devices, which use local IoT networking technologies
to communicate with the hub. The internal
MQTT API can be used to exchange commands
and report changes within the system, therefore
the integrated devices are fully operational and
can be used in automation rules.
The virtual weather device is represented by
multiple services. The location service holds
November/December 2021
the address, and the latitude and the longitude
of the location of interest. Weather service
exposes the relevant current and forecast
weather information through properties such as
current temperature, minimal and maximal
expected temperature, air pressure, and humidity.
Astronomical data service allows to track
the sunrise and sunset times, whereas wind service
exposes the information about wind direction
and speed. Configuration service allows to
configure the period of weather data refresh. It
takes 118 ms for the hub to obtain the weather
data if it is already cached by the smart home
cloud, and 222 ms to refresh it if needed (see
Table 1).
The integration of weather platform allows to
create automation rules based on the virtual
device properties. For example, the lighting can
be turned ON at the time of the sunset, or turned
OFF a couple of minutes after sunrise. Also, the
air conditioning can be controlled based on the
current and expected temperature information,
windows and doors closed or open depending
on the current wind speed, etc.
The integrated camera exposes motion detection
service, camera positioning service as well
as video streaming and video recording services.
Camera positioning service controls camera pan,
tilt and zoom, using the ONVIF protocol. Other
Table 1. Performance test results.
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