Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573

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Future Generation Computer Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs

IoT big data analytics for smart homes with fog and cloud computing
∗
Abdulsalam Yassine a , Shailendra Singh b , M. Shamim Hossain c , , Ghulam Muhammad d
a
Department of Software Engineering, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, Ontario, P7B 5E1, Canada
b
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, Ontario, P7B 5E1, Canada
c
Department of Software Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia
d
Department of Computer Engineering, College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh 11543, Saudi Arabia

highlights

• Knowledge base solution for IoT Data Analytics Applications in Smart Homes.
• A comprehensive framework for data collection, processing and real-time recognition.
• Building a distinguished profile for activities based on the chronological order of their sensors.

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history: Internet of Things (IoT) analytics is an essential mean to derive knowledge and support applications for
Received 12 May 2018 smart homes. Connected appliances and devices inside the smart home produce a significant amount of
Received in revised form 28 July 2018 data about consumers and how they go about their daily activities. IoT analytics can aid in personalizing
Accepted 22 August 2018
applications that benefit both homeowners and the ever growing industries that need to tap into
Available online 15 September 2018
consumers profiles. This article presents a new platform that enables innovative analytics on IoT captured
Keywords: data from smart homes. We propose the use of fog nodes and cloud system to allow data-driven services
Internet of Things (IoT) and address the challenges of complexities and resource demands for online and offline data processing,
Cloud computing storage, and classification analysis. We discuss in this paper the requirements and the design components
Fog computing of the system. To validate the platform and present meaningful results, we present a case study using a
Big data analytics dataset acquired from real smart home in Vancouver, Canada. The results of the experiments show clearly
Energy management the benefit and practicality of the proposed platform.
Smart homes
© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Smart homes are the theme of the future living. Many com-
munities across the globe are currently deploying smart homes
as part of modernization initiatives. These always-on houses gen-
erate massive amount of valuable data from smart devices and
appliances connected to an IoT system [1]. The ability to analyze
these data in near real-time and off-line allows for the discovery
of various information that has significant impact on our society’s
safety, health, and economy. For example, a smart city’s health
care system can determine the status of patients inside a smart
home by monitoring their usage of appliances and detect their
routine or abnormal activities that could indicate signs of health
problems [2–4]. A utility company may analyze large amount of
energy consumption data from appliances inside the home to learn
about the behavior of occupants and recommend electricity bill
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: ayassine@lakeheadu.ca (A. Yassine),
ssingh59@lakeheadu.ca (S. Singh), mshossain@ksu.edu.sa (M.S. Hossain),
ghulam@ksu.edu.sa (G. Muhammad).
reduction plans for consumers based on energy usage profiles [5].
Such scenario leads to cost reduction not only to consumers but
also to utility companies. Real-time IoT application allows manu-
factures to analyze data continuously and determine or predict an
appliance maintenance schedule or promptly replace malfunction
equipment. These examples of IoT applications reveal the advan-
tages of analyzing smart home data. While such data presents valu-
able opportunities in understanding the dynamics and behavior of
smart homes and their occupants, it also spells out a tremendous
challenge regarding data management, storage, and analytics. To
ensure that users are not drowning in floods of data, they need
systems capable of managing, analyzing and transforming this
amount of data into actionable insights for smart city applications
that demand prompt actions with stringent requirements. These
systems must also meet the needs of scalability with the growing
volume of data and the temporal granularity of decision-making
whether it is off-line or near real-time.
In this paper, we propose a system which combines IoT and
big data analytics technology with fog and cloud computing. The
proposed system addresses the challenge of designing efficient

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.08.040
0167-739X/© 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
564 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573
solutions that are fast and can handle large volumes of unstruc-
tured smart home data. In this system, fog computing provides fast
near real-time analytics while the abundance of computing and
storage resources in the cloud system is used to carry out com-
putationally intensive applications. The process involves taking
data-in-motion from IoT sources, such as individual smart meters,
appliances, and devices and integrate them for highly sophisti-
cated analytics processes that deliver timely decision-making. Fog
computing nodes are resource-efficient because they are equipped
with virtual machine technologies capable of continuously pro-
cessing fresh IoT streams of data and transfer the processed data
to the cloud for further processing [6]. Cloud computing offers a
multitude of benefits such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):
providing access to unlimited storage space, Platform as a Service
(PaaS): potential to execute resource-intensive applications, Soft-
ware as a Service (SaaS): facilitates software access, and Utility
Services: store massive volume of data for remote access. Fog
computing play a critical role in the IoT ecosystem to support the
processing of big data for near real-time responses. Furthermore,
fog computing fundamentally processes and stores data at the
edge of the cloud system [7]. This unified architecture allows us to
resolve the latency issues pertaining to the underlying transport
communication network of cloud systems which has a significant
impact on time-sensitive applications [1,8–12].
For the evaluation of the proposed system, we present a case
study of analyzing and processing streams of data from a smart
home. The smart home generates continuous streams of the mas-
sive data in short time intervals. Processing and analyzing such
data is vital for many applications (e.g., healthcare systems, smart
grid energy management applications etc.) [13–15]. The main con-
tribution made in this paper are as follows:
• Proposing a platform for IoT smart home big data analytics
with fog and cloud computing. The system design allows
the processing of massive multiple smart home IoT data in
distributed fog nodes, which accommodate cognitive data
mining algorithms that provide insight from processed data.
This approach is rather significant for many applications that
require access to information for timely functional economies
of scale, where smart home operations can be cost-effectively
deployed and used.
• Providing detail requirements and design component anal-
ysis of the platform architecture. Specifically, we discuss re-
quirements of scalability regarding the processing of multiple
IoT data streams from smart homes and the design aspects of
minimizing communication overhead between the fog nodes
and the cloud systems. Furthermore, we discussed the design
of mechanisms for task allocation, IoT management and inte-
gration services, and admission authentication of smart home
and third-party applications.
• Presenting a case study of an actual smart home. We ana-
lyzed the smart home IoT data for behavioral and predic-
tive analytics of occupants pertaining to energy consump-
tion routines and patterns. We discussed the applications of
these finding within the context of demand response man-
agement and electricity cost reduction. These analysis are
considered among the primary functions and applications
of smart homes, which can be scaled with fog and cloud
computing to an entire smart community [16].
The organization of the paper is as follows: in the next section,
we discuss the related work. In Section 3, we present the compo-
nents of the proposed platform followed by a study case in Section
4. Finally, in Section 5 we present the conclusion of the study and
provide direction for future work.
2. Related work
Recently, several studies have proposed systems and frame-
works for IoT data analytics using various architectures involving
fog and cloud computing. In this section, we discuss these studies
especially those that are representative of the state-of-the-art and
close to our work.
Many researchers tackled issues closely related to our work
such as those in [17–22] and [23]. For example the work in [17],
focuses on predictive analytics for smart homes that need access
to historical data which must be stored in a large database that
can only be provided by a cloud system. The work in [18] inves-
tigated the smart home services for in-depth analysis of home
appliance frequent pattern usage. Specifically, the discovery of co-
utilization behavior of appliances inside smart homes. For this
purpose the authors propose a multidimensional patterns mining
framework from a large number of residential users connected to
an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The authors in [19] developed a
new gateway system to automatically integrate and configure new
home-based IoT devices for seamless analytics in cloud systems.
The SLASH framework in [20] presents new approach for smart
home adaptivity and self-learning mechanisms. The idea include
the development of big data [24] layer with an analytical engine
that supports occupants behavior. The work in [23] proposes an
end-to-end home automation system that supports multiple IoT
protocols for data acquisition and analysis. The authors claim that
their system is capable of handling data coming from city-wide
deployed devices. Similar to the work in [23], a general smart city
paradigm is proposed in [21] for IoT big data analytics system that
integrate sensors from smart homes, traffic, vehicles, surveillance
sensors, etc. using Hadoop ecosystem real-life environment.
In addition to the above mentioned studies, the authors in [25]
present real-time data analytics engine that facilitates processing
of data near the source of information. The proposed analytical
engine ensures that data is processed before it is offloaded to
the central cloud system. The system coordinates the analytics
between the physical location of the IoT devices in the vicinity
leading to the creation of device-to-device analytical layer under
the cloud system. The main issue with this approach is that it adds
complexities to the system to the point that makes it practically
prohibitive. Similar to [25], the works in [26,27] and [28] address
the issues of data analytics at the edge of the cloud system, but
focused on the latency problem of processing large amount of IoT
data using fog computing. The design approach in these systems
brings resources of edge computing as close as possible to the
source where data is generated. The work in [29] further investi-
gates this issue and develops mechanisms to estimate the latency
for cloud–fog–IoT continuum systems.
For real-time analytics of IoT data in uncontrolled environ-
ments, the work presented in [30] proposed a general-purpose IoT
framework that integrate wireless hub nodes to support analytical
reliability and assures real-time data acquisition. The work in [31]
proposed a system that runs data analytics in a distributed fashion
using fog computing, IoT devices, edge and central servers. The
main approach is to optimize the decision-making of analytics such
that all IoT devices are fairly treated and satisfied. The results of
this work show a promising solution for enhancing the utilization
of fog and cloud computing systems. To facilitate intelligence of
the edge network in providing robust analytics for IoT systems, the
work in [32] outlined a new approach to dynamically automate the
transitions between the central cloud system and its edge taking
into account the various conditions and requirements of the appli-
cations. The author in [33] proposes a general model and architec-
ture that ingests IoT data streams into fog computing nodes [34].
The model addresses the challenges of existing techniques and
the shortcomings pertaining to the essential dimensions of data
analytics related to system, data, human and optimization.
 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573
It is important to note that a platform with fog computing
nodes coupled with cloud computing offers a resource-efficient
processing of IoT big data at near realtime basis while providing
insights and processed data to cloud for further processing and
analysis. This integrate design facilitates us to address the latency
issues of cloud system that can have a remarkable impact on time-
sensitive applications.
Our work in this paper is in line with the work presented in [23],
however, our focus is on a scalable IoT big data analytics platform
with fog computing that is capable of managing, analyzing and
transforming household energy consumption data into actionable
insights. Therefore, we present a holistic architecture that is suit-
able for an end-to-end analytics of IoT connected smart homes. We
discuss the validity of the architecture and the interconnectivity
of analytical modules. For the evaluation of the system model,
we present a case study of data streams collected from an actual
smart home in Vancouver, Canada. Our case study addresses the
challenges of data analytics of smart home energy consumption
for smart grid applications (e.g. Automatic Demand Response). It
must be noted that this work differs from [5,3,35] and [36]. These
works do not address the IoT big data analytics in fog and cloud
computing systems, but focus on analyzing behavioral energy con-
sumption that lead to peak hours as in [5], activity recognition for
healthcare applications [3], and prediction models [36]. This pa-
per introduces detail system requirement and component design
analysis for an IoT big data analytics platform for smart homes via
fog and cloud computing. The smart home dataset, the platform as
well as the results in this paper are completely different from our
previous work.
3. Platform overview
The fast deployment of smart homes is taking off across the
world, and it is becoming a compelling business opportunity for
various industrial applications. Smart homes that are supported
by IoT paradigm generate large useful data. However, unlocking
the potential of this information hinges on the development of
sophisticated big data analytics tools and platforms capable of
processing, analyzing and managing these data in cost-effective
ways. In this section, we address the system requirements for the
development of IoT big data with fog and cloud computing, and we
present the components of the proposed platform.
3.1. Platform requirements
The design of innovative platforms that are suited to support a
large amount of data generated from smart homes possess peculiar
requirements, functionalities, and design structures.
• Resource Distribution: Processing large amount of data gen-
erated from household appliances and devices require cost-
effective and resource efficient big data analytics closer to
the physical system. Mining continuous streams of IoT data
should meet the timing requirements for many smart city
applications such as automatic demand response, sensitive
healthcare applications, safety and surveillance operations,
etc. which require predictable latency for near real-time de-
tection and notification. Mostly, these functionalities face
serious constraints when processing data and invoking ser-
vices from the back-end cloud. The proximity of resources
helps overcome the high-latency that is associated with the
provisioning of cloud-based services. Therefore, optimized
scheduling mechanisms are required to coordinate the tasks
among fog computing nodes and should appropriately allo-
cate resources from the cloud system.
565
• Scalable Analytics: Data streams from smart homes present
a challenging prospect for processing and mining operations.
These data streams are received at the system in high vol-
umes, high velocity and from various sources. Furthermore,
smart home data change over time due to the changing be-
havior of occupants. Hence, such data require scalable tools
to process and analyze them for different behavioral traits.
Also, these data come from different communication chan-
nels that contribute to the abnormalities and noises that
require further cleaning and pre-processing to reduce their
dimensionality and better extract useful information.
• Performance: IoT data streams should be handled in a par-
allel manner to boost the performance of data analytics and
to optimize the smart home operations. Depending on the
analytics activity, the specific requirements include elastic re-
source acquisition, efficient data network management, data
reliability, and functional data abstractions. Furthermore, IoT
data processing should make full use of all computational
resources to address performance challenges of near real-
time and off-line computation algorithms such as finding
concealed patterns, quickly and valuable knowledge. Further-
more, there is a need for coordination between fog computing
nodes and the cloud system. Fog nodes cannot carry out high
computational tasks because of resource and storage limita-
tions, and therefore, intensive-applications are performed in
the cloud servers for better performance [37].
• Integration: At any single time instant, data collected from
different devices inside smart homes are unstructured and
cannot be processed using conventional tools. Therefore, IoT
data from smart homes require dedicated integration mech-
anisms to be further processed in a unified system. Such
approach imposes restrictions on edge computing selection
concerning add-hoc pre-processing operations. As a result, an
automated and adaptive data ingestion methods must be de-
veloped to integrate incoming varying data rates and volumes
and accommodate various data sources and applications re-
quirements. These methods should process all inbound time-
series data, execute data transformations, and coordinate the
transmission of the processed data to the cloud system.
• Visualization:, Another major requirement for dealing with
large-scale IoT data from smart homes, is data-relevance
through visualization. This requirement is rather significant
since different applications rely on the visualization of the un-
derlying trends and the perceived presentation of data after
being processed and analyzed for decision-making.
Application-specific data visualization serves the domain ex-
pertise by providing meaningful results based on data quality.
For example, presenting abstraction of data clustering for co-
utilization of appliances inside a smart home leads to better
understanding the behavior of occupants inside the house
and their activities.
To satisfy the above requirements, in this paper we present an
IoT big data analytics platform for processing and analyzing a large
volume of smart homes data streams. Next subsection describes
the proposed platform.
3.2. Platform design components
Fig. 1 shows the architecture of the proposed platform. It con-
sists of IoT big data analytics with fog computing nodes and cloud
system. The components of the platform support complex opera-
tion of continuous integration, processing and analytics of multiple
smart home data. The fog nodes broaden the services of the cloud
system to the network edge close to the physical locations of
the smart homes, thus allowing for faster data processing and
services applications that can only be served within specific time
566 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573

Fig. 1. IoT Big Data Analytics with Fog Computing.

Fig. 2. The IoT Big Data management service is responsible for request handling, authentication and service registration.

constraints. The cloud system takes the heavy lifting of processing
computationally intensive application.
In the proposed model, smart homes are the source of data.
Such data typically arrive at the smart home IoT gateway from
different sources including household appliances and smart de-
vices. The acquisition of data is typically performed by specific IoT
protocols such as machine-to-machine (M2M)/Message Queuing
Telemetry Transport (MQTT) that communicate with smart home
devices and IoT gateways. An IoT gateway acts as an agent that
mediates between the smart home and the cloud system. The IoT
gateway may also provide local processing and storage functions
including autonomously controlling and filtering of data streams.
In the proposed model, the IoT gateway can be used to serve mul-
tiple households while ensuring trusted connectivity and security
by enforcing policy-based access mechanisms. The acquisition of
data during this communication process passes through several
stages until the data rest on cloud storage devices where further
processing may be performed in future. As mentioned in section
‘‘Introduction’’, smart home data have the volume, velocity, and
variety characteristics to be considered as big data. The analytics
operations include filtering and cleaning, clustering and aggrega-
tion where each operation takes extensive time depending on the
nature of the data. The following are the details of the platform
components.
• Smart Home Components: The smart home consists of sen-
sors, devices, appliances and metering systems. The com-
ponents of the smart home are roughly categorized into
 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573
three tiers namely cyber–physical, connectivity, and context-
aware. The cyber–physical tier consists of smart devices, me-
tering systems, sensor systems, appliances, electrical vehicle
charging points, and energy management systems. These
elements are responsible for all actual operations of the
smart home and are installed on the home premises. They
interact with the outside world through the connectivity tier.
As mentioned earlier in this section several communication
protocols allow these devices to communicate among them-
selves and with the cloud system through an IoT gateway.
The connectivity tier is responsible for outbound and inbound
communication with the smart home, which includes direct
interaction with the occupants through mobile or web ap-
plications. The context-aware tier provides real intelligence
about the essence of the smart home. Context-aware tier
includes user-defined rules and policies to manage the inter-
action and the services of the smart home. This tier allows
for context-based privacy and security configuration that
satisfies the occupants’ concerns. Activity recognition, event
detection, behavioral and predictive analytics are performed
by the fog and cloud computing system and reported to the
smart home applications. For example, behavioral analytics
can be very effective to understand how users go about
using their appliances and derive conclusions about energy
consumption, which can be used to forecast the future de-
mand. Activity recognition can be used to allow caregivers
in healthcare applications [3] to detect abnormal behavior of
patients. The applicability and benefit of such analytics and
services are countless.
• IoT Management and Integration Services: The IoT man-
agement service is a broker-based subsystem responsible
for handling IoT service requests from multiple smart home
applications into the cloud system. It plays a vital role in
providing authentication services for these requests and en-
sures that the rules of admission are consistent with the pre-
configured policies in the rules engine. Services that require
access to data about the smart home must register with
the IoT management broker before using any data from the
cloud system. The orchestration of these tasks are handled
by the requests handler after registration and authentication.
The operation of the IoT management services are protocol
independent and are responsible for maintaining continuity
and flexibility for the whole IoT ecosystem. Fig. 2 illustrates
the operation of the IoT management services. In this figure
all services are first authenticated and then registered before
accessing the data. Fig. 3 shows a high level description of
the integration services in the proposed platform. This ser-
vice provides seamless access to external applications via
programming interfaces (APIs). The main approach in this
design is the decoupling of the analytical components of the
fog nodes and the cloud system from user applications. By so
doing, the integration service assures security since external
applications would not be able to have any direct access to the
analytical engine. Also, it adds data abstraction by enabling
the use of data for various user-specific applications including
mobile and desktop. Another main advantage is providing in-
teroperability for various channel technologies (Wi-Fi, Blue-
tooth, ZigBee, and LPWAN etc.) and data transfer protocols
M2M, MQTT, CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol), AMQP
(Advanced Message Queuing Protocol)), Websocket etc.
• Fog Computing Nodes: The fog node provides additional re-
sources and computational services to support various smart
home time-sensitive applications. The fog nodes provide the
means for accelerating analytics services while ensuring in-
creased responsiveness from the cloud infrastructure. Fig. 1
shows the main functions of the fog node in our platform. It is
567
composed of several functions including data pre-processing,
pattern mining, classification, prediction, and visualization.
These functions are responsible for rapid analytics of smart
home data collected through the IoT system while the ag-
gregated results are sent to the cloud or directly to the ser-
viced applications. The fog node performs all the short-term
analytics at the edge of the cloud system. Data arrived at
the fog node are unstructured and do not have a predefined
model. During the cleaning/pre-processing process, errors,
redundancies, and outliers are removed to ensure consis-
tency. In the pre-processing stage, all IoT streams are filtered,
parsed and translated into a unified data structure for further
analysis. At this stage, raw data which contains millions of
high time-resolution data records are transformed into a
pre-defined resolution for each device. The frequent pattern
mining techniques are conducted on the data to discover
the occurrence of appliance correlation in data streams. Fre-
quent pattern mining searches for these recurring patterns
in a given dataset to determine associations and correla-
tions among patterns of interest [38]. In clustering stage,
we employ an unsupervised form of classification which is
capable of distinguishing classes of appliances learned from
the data [38]. Prediction analytics are responsible for fore-
casting occupants activities or use of certain devices. Visual-
ization provides an interactive medium for the user to dis-
cover knowledge from data to enhance the decision-making
process. Finally, the results of the stages mentioned above are
sent to the cloud system which has an abundance of resources
for computationally intensive tasks.
It should be noted that the configuration of the fog node
to ensure the privacy of the smart home is a challenging
prospect. As fog nodes are becoming a major computation
hub, smart home private data become vulnerable to vari-
ous attacks. Therefore, a new breed of trust management
systems and privacy protection mechanisms are required to
tackle such problem. These mechanisms are not considered
in this paper. However, other remedies for this problem can
be found in [39–42] and [43].
• Cloud System: In the proposed platform, the cloud system is
responsible for providing core services to smart home appli-
cations that include historical data analytics, extended stor-
age capabilities, and core smart home management infras-
tructure. The cloud services include smart home device track-
ing, configuration, analysis, reporting, authentication and au-
thorization services. These functions provide value-added
service for users to control and manage their smart homes
using different means ( e.g., web and mobile applications) as
well as to interact with third-party vendors. Also, the cloud
system provides heavy computational using large-scale data
mining resources such as MapReduce, Spark, Storm, etc. The
cloud system uses its back-end computation to gain business
insight and updated the fog nodes about new operational
rules.
4. Case study
In this case study, we perform IoT data analytics of appliances
and devices from a smart home in Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada. The data is publicly available from Harvard Education
website [44]. The dataset consists of one minute interval mea-
surements of multiple smart home appliances over the span of
two years, April 2012–April 2014. We perform data analytics on
IoT streams to uncover occupants behavior of appliance usage
such as identifying frequent patterns associated with appliances
including hour of day, day of week, and month of year as a means
of understanding how occupants go about their daily routines. For
568 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573
Fig. 3. The IoT Big Data integration service is responsible for smart home functional and third party services and applications.
this particular study, we assume that the data is acquired at the
fog node where an analytical engine is responsible of performing
immediate analysis to satisfy the requirements of applications such
as energy consumption management, targeted advertisement, ac-
tivity recognition. Ideally, for this particular case study a scalable
computing resources are required to enhance the performance
with additional acquisition of data. Our tests are conducted on a
single node consisting of computer system running i5-Core CPU
with 8GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage device. The main processing
resources are allocated to the analytics part where we process 2-
years of data. The current running time takes few minutes which
can be improved with more computing resources, however, it
shows that one fog node is capable of processing more than one
smart home.
In this paper, we focus on energy consumption analytics of IoT
data from smart homes. Specifically, we analyze IoT data aggregate
of energy measurements of home appliances. An application such
as residential Automatic Demand Response (ADR) requires energy
consumption data about appliances in residential homes to be an-
alyzed to engage them in demand response signals effectively [45].
To realize this concept, we first assume that every home is attached
to a fog node that is responsible to perform the analytics. The aim is
to analyze the frequent pattern of home appliance usages, the con-
text of appliance usage (i.e co-utilization of appliances), the cluster
of appliances with respect to the time of use (i.e spatio-temporal
analysis), and the forecast of appliance usage. The following steps
illustrate the life-cycle of the analytics at the fog node.
Data Cleaning and Preparation: The dataset contains mil-
lions of records (sample of raw data is shown Table 1) with a
large amount of data about appliances. Data about appliances is
collected every minute for a length of two years (April 2012–
April 2014). These data measurements include: unix timestamp,
line voltage, voltage, apparent power. The process of cleaning the
data started by importing the data files in Python scripts. The
cleaning process includes eliminate unnecessary columns, convert
Unix timestamp to human readable date, remove values that are
below the standby power threshold, removing outliers and du-
plicate rows. The entire cleaning process was completed using
Python with regular expressions (RegEx). The preparation of the
data includes comparing all the reading to a pattern and only
the matching patterns were stored in a database. The tuples not
matching the pattern are considered noise because the values for
power and timestamp are supposed to be Integers only, hence, any
different character in this values would represent an error in the
recording process of those tuples. The process of pattern matching
also ensures the quality of the data, because any tuple that was
incomplete or inconsistent did not match the pattern and therefore
was ignored. For the purpose of training, we developed a synthetic
dataset which include the appliance, the time of its operation,
the date, and the power. With this information in hand, we can
then perform clustering analysis and frequent pattern of appliance
usage such as the hour of day, day of week, month of the year.
Table 1
Sample of IoT data from the smart home.
Timestampa Apparent power consumption of appliancesb
1360548360 210
– –
1360548420 70
– –
1360548480 28
a
Unix timestamp.
b
Example of appliances includes Dishwasher, Toaster, TV, DryerHome Theater,
Washing Machine, Laptop etc.
Frequent Pattern Mining: For frequent pattern mining, we are
interested in analyzing the occurrences of when certain appliances
are being used by examining the ‘‘ON/OFF’’ state and the energy
consumption. Being in an On state allows for the inference that a
human is currently using a particular appliance. This information
can be beneficial in certain applications, and as a result, the data
and patterns mined have a value to industries. For example, by
knowing when an individual is likely to have the television turned
on could help companies target advertisements. We would like to
derive these patterns in discrete-valued relations [36]. Specifically,
we study the appliance usage patterns of the whole house and seek
to uncover associations over time domains. Formally, let A be a
database consisting of n itemsets T1 such that A = (T1 , T2 , . . . , Tn ).
An itemset is considered a frequent pattern if it appears with a
certain frequency in a database transaction. The user may define
the threshold level of the frequency count of an itemset in a
transaction. One of the methods of determining the frequency
count is known as the support count s which is defined as the
statistical count of the frequency of an itemset in a transaction
carried over the database A. For example, two itemsets I (I ⊆ A) and
J (J ⊆ A) are counted as frequent patterns in a transaction if their
support sI and sJ is above a threshold value known as the minimum
support minsup. In the case of finding a frequent pattern, then the
association rules are determined. An association rule is expressed
as {I ⇒ J } and are derived from the support − confidence, where
support sI ⇒J such that s(I ⇒ J) = sI ⇒J = s(I ∪ J) is the percentage
of all transactions that have (I ∪ J) in A. The support represents the
mutual preconditions of this association in the database while the
confidence is the preconditions that contribute to the consequence.
In this sense, the frequency of itemsets in a transaction suggests
the statistical significance of the association rule (meaning the
probability P(I , J)), determined by the confidence |s(I)| (meaning
|s(I ∪J)|
the conditional probability P(I |J)) [46,38]. We employ the frequent
pattern FP-Growth algorithm [46,38] and its extension [5] on this
smart home dataset. Procedure (1) shows the steps of capturing
the frequent patterns from the dataset. Figs. 4, 5, and 6 show
the pattern of energy consumption of six appliances in the home
comprising hours of day, day of week, month of year. We applied
a minimum support threshold of 30% on the dataset and turned
all values that were below the threshold to 0 and all the ones
above to 1. This allowed us to obtain a binary matrix to check what
appliances are in use at the specific time as shown in the Table 2.
 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573 569

Procedure-1:Generating Frequent Patterns-GP Growth the Silhouette coefficient for cluster Ci and for having k clusters as
Require: Start by constructing the Frequent Pattern Tree (FP-T)with algorithm rCi = av erage(syj ) for j = d1 ..dn and rk = av erage(sCi ) for i = 1..k
in [34]. respectively. The higher the average silhouette value, the better
Ensure: Generation of Frequent Patterns
the clustering. In other words, the average Silhouette provides
1: Start by single path in the FP-Tree
2: Check for the support s among all the combination of nodes in the FP-Tree
observation about the various values of k ∈ 1, 2, 3 . . . m, where
3: Determine the frequent patterns m represents the unique objects in a dataset. To find out the
4: Add to Database A the discovered patterns optimal number of clusters, the process is continuously executed
5: Repeat steps for multiple paths in FP-Tree and the average Silhouette coefficient is calculated until finding the
6: Determine the frequent patterns using for multiple paths optimal number of clusters k that maximizes rk .
7: Add to Database A the discovered patterns
Fig. 8 shows the clustering of appliances at the hour of the
8: Final Frequent Patterns = Single path ∪ Multiple path
9: Determine association rules based in %30 support using algorithm in [5]
day, where cluster strength signifies the frequency of use of appli-
10: Create a binary matrix and update it with all appliance patterns within the ance, i.e., a higher strength of a cluster for an appliance indicates
threshold. the higher use of it during the period. Higher or lower usage
of appliance, i.e., patterns of appliance usage can be the direct
representative of energy consumption behavior of occupants. Such
an analysis can be conducted at various levels such as individual
house, group of houses, community or neighborhood, or at the
Table 2
system level. When done at a higher level such as neighborhood
Sample of a binary matrix to uncover the frequent pattern of appliance usages.
or system level, the outcomes can help profile houses according
10:30 pm– 11 pm– 11:30 pm– DWE- DWE- CDE- DWE-
11 pm 11:30 pm 12 pm CDE TVE TVE CDE-TVE
to energy consumption behavior and customize demand response
mechanism to be more efficient. Further, at a single home, the
0 0 0 1 1 1 1
0 0 0 1 1 1 1
outcomes can assist adapt recommendations to reduce household
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 energy cost while respecting the occupants expected comfort.
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Moreover, it feasible to consider renewable energy generation at
0 0 0 1 1 1 1 the neighborhood or house level to fine-tune demand response
0 0 0 1 1 1 1 programs or energy reduction recommendations.
1 0 0 1 1 1 1
0 0 0 1 1 1 1 5. Conclusion and future work

In this paper, we presented a platform for smart home IoT

The final result of the frequent pattern mining is the association
among appliances that are the result of the simultaneous use of
the appliance by occupants. Fig. 7 shows an example of hourly use
and day of the week use of appliances. From Fig. 7-a it is apparent
the two appliances used the most together are the dishwasher and
television between the hours of 6 pm–10:30 pm. For the three
appliances (dishwasher, dryer, and television) on at the same time,
the most likely time of the day this will happen between 8–8:30
pm. The days of the week in Fig. 7-b demonstrates that very often
the dishwasher and television are frequently on together at the
same time. Inspecting each day individually, you can see certain
patterns such as Monday and Tuesday night the dishwasher and
television are on the longest amount of time or Saturdays the
television and dishwasher are on later at night.
Cluster Mining: The above frequent pattern analysis provided
insight about how the smart home occupants are co-utilizing
their appliances. Clustering analysis allows us to interpret time-
intervals associated with groups of appliances. This is rather im-
portant to uncover deeper behavior of appliance energy consump-
tion of specific times (e.g. peak hours). To achieve this objective,
we implement the k-mean clustering algorithm in [38]. The basic
principle of the k-mean algorithm is that it defines k centers which
are placed in specific
∑kpositions
∑Ci away from each other. Then, the
2
function G(z) = i=1 j=1 (∥ai − bj ∥) is used to determine
the squared error value, where ai − bj is the Euclidean distance
between a and b, Ci represents the number of data points in ith
cluster. Determining the optimal number of k is vital for getting
better results. There are many methods for determining the ideal
number k as described in [47]. The approach in this work is using
the silhouette coefficient as a means of calculating the optimal
number k [48]. This method basically measures the quality of the
cluster by evaluating how well the data points are positioned
within a cluster. It computes the average distance of yj given as
xj = average{dis(yj , yi )} to all other data points in cluster Ci and
then determine wj = min(wj ) across all the clusters except Ci .
The Silhouette coefficient for yj is determined as ryj =
big data analytics with fog and cloud computing. We provided
detail requirement analysis and illustration of the platform com-
ponents. The process of performing the analytics in the fog node
is presented, and the results show the possible applications of
the system in different aspects. For example, applications of the
data acquired may include activity recognition to identify health
problems, identify energy consumption patterns and energy saving
planning, and predict appliance maintenance schedule to avoid
expensive repairs and ensure efficient operations from the point
of view of energy consumption.
In general, the platform can aid effective and in-time deci-
sion making for individual house owners by facilitating various
energy management programs at home level. Household energy
consumption management and data analytics is a complex op-
eration that requires continuous integration of multiple sources
into a common processing system with easy access to data. Other
possible application may be extended to serve companies who are
interested in targeted advertisement. They can choose a time slot
where customers are using these appliances; typically between
6 pm and 9 pm because the residents are frequently watching
television at this time. Analytics in fog nodes increases the ability
of the platform to manage an integrated array of IoT data streams
for various applications in highly automated ways which result
in significant savings for service providers. Also, service providers
can design and develop their applications using fog nodes that
offer abundance elasticity to enhance performance, redundancy
and storage devices for their applications.
For future work, we plan to develop optimization mechanisms
such as those in [49,50] to determine the optimal distribution
and configuration of fog nodes while taking into consideration the
computational resources and capability of processing the required
data from multiple homes. Furthermore, we plan to refine the
platform component and test with different datasets from various
homes. This approach is crucial to validate the applicability of the
platform and its robustness in dealing with all kind of IoT data
measurements. We also plan to study a benchmarking scheme to
assess and capture the performance of the platform and analytics
under different concerns including runtime, CPU utilization, data
(wj −xj )
max(xj ,wj )
and size, incoming requests, etc.
570 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573

Fig. 4. Hour of the Day Energy Consumption Pattern - (a) Dishwasher (DWE), (b) Cloth Dryer (DWE), (c) Kettle (KE), (d) TV, (e) Home Theater (HTE), (f) Laptop (EBE).

Fig. 5. Day of the Week Energy Consumption Pattern - (a) Dishwasher (DWE), (b) Cloth Dryer (DWE), (c) Kettle (KE), (d) TV, (e) Home Theater (HTE), (f) Laptop (EBE).

Fig. 6. Day of the Week Energy Consumption Pattern - (a) Dishwasher (DWE), (b) Cloth Dryer (DWE), (c) Kettle (KE), (d) TV, (e) Home Theater (HTE), (f) Laptop (EBE).
 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573
Fig. 7. Frequent Pattern of appliances — Dishwasher (DWE), Cloth Dryer (DWE), TV - (a) Hour of the Day (b) Day of Week [D1 Sunday–D5 Saturday].
Fig. 8. Smart Home Appliance Clustering — Hour of the Day.
Acknowledgment
The authors extend their appreciation to the Deanship of Sci-
entific Research at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for
funding this work through the research group project no. RG-1436-
023.
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Abdulsalam Yassine received the B.Sc. degree in elec-
trical engineering from Beirut Arab University, Lebanon,
in 1993, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical
and computer engineering from the University of Ottawa,
Canada, in 2004 and 2010, respectively. Between 2001
and 2013, he was a member of the Technical Staff in
the Wireless Communication Division, Nortel Networks,
and later at Alcatel-Lucent, Ottawa, Canada. From 2013
to 2016, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the DISCOVER
Laboratory, School of Electrical Engineering and Com-
puter Science, University of Ottawa. Currently, he is an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Software Engineering, Lakehead Univer-
sity, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. He serves on the editorial board of the ACM
Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications as an
associate editor. His research interests are mostly focused on behavior and pre-
dictive analytics, big data systems and networks, artificial intelligence, IoT system,
smart cities, smart environments, and smart grids research and applications.
Shailendra Singh Shailendra Singh received the B.Eng.
degree in electronics engineering from Pt. Ravishankar
Shukla University, Raipur, India, and the M.A.Sc. degree
in electrical and computer engineering from the Uni-
versity of Ottawa, Canada in 2015. He has more than
18 years of industry experience and is currently a Ph.D.
student in the department of Electrical and Computer
engineering, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario,
Canada. His research interests include big data analyt-
ics, behavioral and predictive analytics, software-defined
networks, artificial intelligence, smart environments, and
cyber–physical systems.
M. Shamim Hossain is a Professor at the Department of Software Engineering,
College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia. He is also an adjunct professor, School of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science (EECS), University of Ottawa, Canada. He received his Ph.D.
in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada.
His research interests include Cloud networking, smart environment (smart city,
smart health), social media, IoT, edge computing and multimedia for healthcare,
deep learning approach for multimedia processing, and multimedia big data. He
has authored and coauthored approximately 200 publications including refereed
IEEE/ACM/Springer/Elsevier journals, conference papers, books, and book chapters.
Recently, his 3 publications is recognized as the ESI Highly Cited Papers. He has
served as a member of the organizing and technical committees of several in-
ternational conferences and workshops. He has served as co-chair, general chair,
workshop chair, publication chair, and TPC for over 12 IEEE and ACM conferences
and workshops. Currently, he is the co-chair of the First IEEE ICME workshop
on Multimedia Services and Tools for smart-health (MUST-SH 2018). He is a
recipient of a number of awards, including, the Best Conference Paper Award,
the 2016 ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and
Applications (TOMM) Nicolas D. Georganas Best Paper Award, and the Research
in Excellence Award from the College of Computer and Information Sciences
(CCIS), King Saud University (3 times in a row). He is on the editorial board of
IEEE Network, IEEE Multimedia, IEEE Access, Journal of Network and Computer
 A. Yassine et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 91 (2019) 563–573 573

Applications (Elsevier), Computers and Electrical Engineering (Elsevier), Human- Ghulam Muhammad is a Professor in Computer Engi-
centric Computing and Information Sciences (Springer), Games for Health Journal, neering Department, College of Computer and Informa-
and International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer). He also tion Sciences (CCIS), King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi
presently serves as a lead guest editor of Future Generation Computer Systems Arabia. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2006 from the
(Elsevier), IEEE Network Magazine, and IEEE Access. Previously, he served as a Department of Electronic and Information Engineering
guest editor of IEEE Communications Magazine, IEEE Transactions on Information at Toyohashi University of Technology, Japan. He has
Technology in Biomedicine (currently JBHI), IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, authored and co-authored more than 180 publications
International Journal of Multimedia Tools and Applications (Springer), Cluster including refereed IEEE/ACM/Springer/Elsevier journals,
Computing (Springer), Future Generation Computer Systems (Elsevier), Computers conference papers, and book chapters. He owns a US
and Electrical Engineering (Elsevier), Sensors (MDPI), and International Journal of patent.
Distributed Sensor Networks. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, a senior member of
ACM and ACM SIGMM.