IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 55

In digital communications, the keys are long
strings of bits that are used to make exclusive
OR combinations with the original plain text
data, on a bit-by-bit basis.

APPLICATIONS

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People have been talking about smart homes for decades. Ralph Lee Smith published Smart House:
The Coming Revolution in Housing back in 1988 [6]. The literature is full of books and articles predicting what these houses will do and when they will arrive. The level of hype has now reached the
point where the U.S. government is thinking about how to respond [7]. The two biggest applications questions relate to what a smart home does and how it is smart.
The strongest applications revolve around the following questions.
▼ Does it save money on electric power and other utilities? [8].
▼ Can it protect our property and our physical safety? [9].
▼ Does it make entertainment more pervasive and convenient? [10].
▼ Does it maintain itself? Does it vacuum itself? Do the toilets clean
themselves? [11].
All of these applications are tangible end-user benefits. Each
application type will attract customers. There are degrees of intelligence in a smart house.
▼ At minimum, a house may contain intelligent objects.
▼ A house may contain several interconnected intelligent objects.
▼ A house may contain intelligent objects connected within the
home and networked to the world.
▼ A house may learn our behaviors to adapt to its residents.
▼ A house may be attentive [12].
The IoT industry is busy preparing for all of these situations. We are
used to homes with intelligent objects.We have been using video game
consoles for four decades, PCs for three decades, and tablets and smartphones for a decade. We've had "home networks" based on broadband,
Ethernet [13], and Wi-Fi [14], [15] for 20 years. Interconnection for home
automation is still uncommon for many competing methods. There is a profusion of ways to connect individual devices or sets of devices to the Internet.
Please refer to Ian Skerrett's assessment: "ABC's of IoT Consortiums" [16].
The applications developers (hardware and software) purport to represent
the end users. They decide what applications to offer and how these applications
will work with other devices and systems. Many companies and consortia will propose how these home automation applications will work. Apple is offering the Home
Kit [17]. Google is pushing Nest [18], which is in turn part of Thread [19]. The ZigBee Alliance [20] is offering to contribute their applications suite to Thread.
An open organization called Internet Protocol Smart Objects (IPSO) [21] is developing a suite
of applications to be delivered over IPv6 [22]. Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) [23] has standardized
a method for encoding these applications over Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) [24].
A previous article in this magazine addressed some IPSO applications [25].

CONNECTIVITY
Today's home automation market requires connectivity at many levels. The first layer is physical, wired,
or wireless. There are a lot of choices, but the most common are based on standards:
▼ IEEE 802.11 [14] and Wi-Fi Alliance [15], primarily used for Internet access
▼ IEEE 802.15.4[26], which in turn supports several different protocols
october 2015

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IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

55
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015
