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The Smart Home Concept: Our Immediate Future: January 2007
The Smart Home Concept: Our Immediate Future: January 2007
The Smart Home Concept: Our Immediate Future: January 2007
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6 authors, including:
Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:
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Vincent Ricquebourg1,2, David Menga2, David Durand3, Bruno Marhic1, Laurent Delahoche1, Christophe
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LTI EDF R&D LaRIA
Avenue des Facultés le Bailly 1 Avenue Charles de Gaule 33 rue Saint Leu
80000 Amiens 92141 Clamart 80000 Amiens
FRANCE FRANCE FRANCE
vincent.ricquebourg@u-picardie.fr david.menga@edf.fr david.durand@u-picardie.fr
Abstract – This general paper aims at presenting the Smart smart homes are emerging. Those projects are oriented
Home concept. In this paper, we will detail a) The Smart multi-media access (Internet access, telephony, video...),
Home concept b) The various networks infrastructures thermal comfort, safety. Smart homes are now dedicated to
specific to the habitat c) Our concepts to model the habitat simplify the life of its inhabitants, to make energy saving,
and to provide the most adapted services to the inhabitants.
to provide comfort and security solutions. In recent
Contrary to the other projects, we direct our work towards a
sensors approach and an ontology modelling of the Smart project, it has been shown that the smart home
Home. Our work has the originality to take into account the technologies have reached a good state of maturity but the
real heterogeneity of information present in an habitat and spreading is still marginal and mostly restricted to
use a Service Oriented Approach (SOA). We can say that our demonstration projects.
paper is a good overview to present what is a Smart Home
and which are the necessary hardware and software Here is a list of projects about smart home :
components to make a Smart Home. 1. Adaptive House, University of Colorado:
http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~mozer/nnh/
I. INTRODUCTION 2. Carnegie Mellon’s Intelligent Workspace
Smart Homes, also known as automated homes, intelligent http://www.arc.cmu.edu/cbpd/iw/index.html
buildings, integrated home systems or domotics, are a 3. Duke University Smart House:
recent design development. Smart homes incorporate http://www.smarthouse.duke.edu
common devices that control features of the home. 4. Georgia Tech Aware Home:
Originally, smart home technology was used to control http://www.cc.gatech.edu/fce/ahri/
environmental systems such as lighting and heating, but 5. Humboldt State CCAT:
recently the use of smart technology has developed so that http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/
almost any electrical component within the house can be 6. MavHome at University of Texas Arlington:
included in the system. Moreover, smart home technology http://mavhome.uta.edu/
does not simply turn devices on and off, it can monitor the 7. Medical Automation Research Center @ UVA:
internal environment and the activities that are being http://marc.med.virginia.edu/
undertaken whilst the house is occupied. The result of 8. MIT House_n: http://architecture.mit.edu/house_n/
these modifications to the technology is that a smart home 9. MIT Media Laboratory: http://www.media.mit.edu/
can now monitor the activities of the occupant of a home, 10. NC State Solar Center: http://www.ncsc.ncsu.edu/
independently operate devices in set predefined patterns or 11. Oberlin College:
independently, as the user requires. http://www.oberlin.edu/ajlc/ajlcHome.html
12. Smart Medical Home:
Smart home technology uses many of the same devices http://www.futurehealth.rochester.edu/smart_home/
that are used in assistive technology to build an 13. UNC Office of the Future:
environment in which many features in the home are http://www.cs.unc.edu/~raskar/Office/
automated and devices can communicate with each other.
The root of this ability to communicate between devices II. SMART HOME : A TECHNICAL APPROACH
lies in the use of the ‘busline’. A busline is a cable that In a schematic way, a smart home can be described by a
connects all the devices together and enables house which is equipped with smart objects, a home
interconnectivity between devices in different room network make it possible to transport information between
throughout the home. objects and a residential gateway to connect the smart
home to the outside Internet world. Smart objects make it
With the important development of the internet and the possible to interact with inhabitants or to observe them.
high speed access (ADSL, satellite, optic fibre,…), the
potential of home working and teleworking is becoming
possible. So, since several years, lots of projects about
On Figure 2, we see five different kind of Area networks.
The first one, WANs (Wide Area Networks), generally
consist of satellites or antennas installed on towers or on
buildings. They serve great geographical areas. These
networks can be served by satellite or terrestrial cellular
technologies or by fixed solutions without wire.
The second one, MANs (Metropolitan Area Networks)
serve an area, for example the customers of a district.
The third one, LANs (Local Area Network) serve the
personal needs for an individual who is responsible to
manage his own network.
The fourth one, PANs (Personal Area Networks) serve the
Figure 1 : The Smart Home concept [2] needs for a user with close objects such as a mobile
telephone.
The fifth one, BANs (Body Area networks) are a
Those smart objects can be just a light that we can control continuity of the personal network, but on a smaller scale.
or ask it about it state, a refrigerator which knows its state This type of network is mainly based on the principle of
and is able to supply in line by itself, telephony, security smart objects localised on the body and, even in the body
systems, videos on demand, …All those object will be of the user.
connected on the home network to give their states or
receive instructions. Home networking allows the home to WANs and MANs are used for outdoor environment. For
become fully connected, controlled externally as well as the WANs, we find the UMTS, EDGE, GPRS or satellite
internally. The residential gateway offers an extern access technologies. Those technologies are wireless (WWANs :
by the way of Ethernet or Internet network. This gateway Wireless Wide Area Networks) and are able to transmit
makes it possible to the house to connect new services and information at a distance of up to 30 Kilometers. For the
to download them. The service provider is in charge of the MANs, we find WIMAX which is able to transmit
new services for inhabitants and their accessibility. information at a distance of up to 20 Kilometers
LANs, PANs and BANs are used in indoor environment.
On Figure 1, we can see what a smart home is. On the For LANs, Wifi and HyperLan are mainly wireless
indoor environment, a smart Home is composed with solutions. Ethernet is the main wire solution.
white appliances like washing machine, refrigerator, some For PANs, Bluetooth, RFID, Zigbee, UWB are wireless
control devices like sensors, motors and user interfaces solutions. CEBus, Convergence, emNET, HAVi™,
like voice, visual or graphical. In this smart home, we find HomePNA™, HomePlug™, HomeRF™, Jini™
the residential gateway which make it possible to connect technology, LonWorks, UPnP, VESA, USB and serial link
to the outside Internet world are wire solutions.
On the outdoor environment, we find the service provider For BANs, few solutions are existing now. We can note
which is in charge to provide services to the inhabitants BodyLAN solution who use the skin to transmit data.
and the network to provide communications between the
smart home and the provider. We will focus on indoor solutions to transmit data. For the
communication in smart home, we will focus on PANs
because they are the most adapted in term of distance and
III. AVAILABLE TECHNOLOGIES IN flow. We can find residential networking standards and
COMMUNICATION DOMAIN initiatives that we are going to develop.
In the communication domain for smart home, we find two
needs. The first one is how to make possible the Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) is the well-known technology
communication of the equipment inside the house. The used in mobile telephone and other objects (printer, digital
second one is to connect the smart house to the outside camera,…). It is a set of protocols for the design of
Internet world. systems that allow radio frequency control over the
system. Bluetooth enables devices to be connected
together within a short distance.
BACnet - A Data Communication Protocol for Building To determine a context, it is important to characterise
Automation and Control Networks [8]. Developed under information coming from this context. For that, it is
the auspices of the American Society of Heating, necessary that the context awareness system is fed in
Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), contextual data which having a semantic level. Those
BACnet is an American national standard, an European contextual information represent the environment and are
pre-standard, and an ISO global standard (ISO 16484-5). perceived in it. When we speak about perception, we are
BACnet is an open standard which is at the moment is directed towards the use of sensors which make it possible
striving to gain acceptance by the industry. to quantify a physical phenomenon. Thus, thanks to
various sensors, it is possible to perceive the activities
LonWorks [9] devices communicate with one another resulting from the environment of the inhabitant, i.e. in the
using the protocol that underlies the LonTalk. This smart home. Thus, we can say that the context perception
implements a system that has established itself as a de- architecture will make it possible to acquire contextual
facto standard for building control and automation. information relating to the inhabitant and his environment
Currently, millions of devices have been installed thanks to heterogeneous sensors in order to provide
worldwide in thousands of LonWorks solutions. Since relevant contextual information. Concretely, we represent
1999 Echelon Corporation opened the LonTalk protocol our context perception system in the following way:
by releasing a downloadable reference implementation of
this protocol for use on any processor. On Figure 4 , we distinguish three steps. The lowest part of
our architecture relates to the sensors. It is on this layer
On Figure 1, we can denote some sensors in the smart that the contextual data acquisition is done thanks to the
home. This is the part on which we will focus. Those sensors.
sensors make it possible to the smart home to observe on
itself. With sensors, the smart home can determine what
the best service is to provide to the inhabitants. This is
what we call a context awareness system.
Figure 4 : Architecture for context perception