Mobile Access to Smart Home Network

Safiyya Rusli, Mehrdad Dianati

Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey Guildford, Surrey, United Kingdom

Abstract. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a smart home application for remote monitoring and control home devices via internet and messaging services of the cellular networks. Current smart home devices can be accessed by its remote control, within a limited coverage span of a personal area network, normally at around a 100m radius. In utilizing a mobile device and the Internet, the access coverage of a smart home device will be rendered virtually limitless, increasing convenience and opening doors of potential advancements in smart home technologies. Keywords: Smart home, SunSPOT, remote access, J2ME, J2SE,.NET CF, smart phone, pocket pc, Internet, GSM.

1 Introduction
With the widespread application of the internet and mobile networking technologies, the term smart home is no longer alien to us as it was a few years ago. Alternatively referred to as Intelligent Homes, Automated Homes and several other terminologies over the years, the term smart homes simply indicates the automation of daily chores with reference to the equipments in the house. This could be simple remote control of lights or more complex functionalities such as remote viewing of the house interiors for surveillance purposes. Smart home technologies have been around for about 30 years, mostly relying on some proprietary technologies and applications. Some of the application such as remote control of lights, sprinklers and various home appliances may seem trivial, but they tend to be important in some growing businesses such as care delivery for elderly and patients with special needs. With the recent expansion of communication networks, smart home applications can be further enhanced with new dimension of capabilities that were not available before. In particular, wireless access technologies will soon enable exotic and economically feasible applications. To this end, in this paper, we present the design and implementation of a pilot project which aims to define framework for remote monitoring and control of smart home devices via the internet and cellular access networks. The design intends to rely on cheap and commercially available devices and services. For the sensing and actuation part we use SunSPOT sensor platform. For the communication part the proposed design can alternatively be deployed using the internet connection or simple and inexpensive test messaging services of cellular networks. We present the design and discuss some specific aspects of our physical implementations.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, a brief review of some major existing applications is given. Section 3 will cover the technical portion of this paper, where the proposed and implemented solution is described. Suggestion for further enhancement in future work will be covered in the conclusion portion of Section 4.

2 Existing smart home technologies

Home based system automations can range from systems as simple as for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, Lighting control, or Audio and Video distribution to multiple sources around the house, to more complicated systems such as for security (involving presence simulations, alarm triggering and medical alerts) and robotics for home care or home management. Smart home applications; or task automations in a general household can be grouped by their main functions such as, i) Alert and sensors heat/smoke sensors, temperature sensors ii) Monitoring Regular feed of sensor data i.e. heat, CCTV monitoring iii) Control switching on/off appliances i.e. sprinklers, lightings iv) Intelligence and Logic Movement tracking i.e security appliances v) Telecare/telehealth distress sensor, blood pressure monitoring Current smart home devices are usually a customised hybrid of one or more of these applications for broader applications. Access to these applications can be generally grouped into 4 access types that are the hardwired type using busline or powerline based technology, as well as the wireless type utilizing radio, infra-red or Bluetooth technology. Future smart-home appliances are moving towards the wireless environment and hence the Bluetooth and radio spectrum will be widely used. It is to date, a rather new technology that needs to be further proven in terms of stability and security. Providers of this technology will have to take into accounts used frequency bands for current appliances such as Bluetooth, cordless phones or Wi-Fi routers to ensure devices are robust from interference. The use of radio frequencies such as at 2.4 GHz for wireless LAN and 8.643Mhz (Z-wave UK) enable the systems to be designed for high bandwidth data flow. Currently one of the existing issues that are associated to smart home applications are the fact that in a home with all sorts of automated application, there will be too many remote controls or monitoring terminal, if the user installed a range of proprietary applications from different providers. There is also the fact that the access range to remotely control these devices are limited by either length of cables or wireless network coverage in a personal area network. It is a widely known fact that an important example of wireless technology application is the mobile phone technology. Mobility is now a lifestyle adopted by all walks of the society, where a United Nation survey has recently revealed that 60% of the world population has a mobile phone subscription [2]. Taking into account a mobile phones necessity in the majority of our society, this solution will attempt to

transfer the functionalities of a smart home devices remote control to a mobilephone, to achieve a truly remote access convenience. Enabling a single remote access to a single corresponding server in a smart home household will also resolve the issue on too many control terminals as discussed previously.

3 Proposed Solution
The SunSPOT development kit will be used to simulate smart home devices. In this paper, the functionalities of a digital home temperature reader, as well as light switches will be demonstrated on the SunSPOTs. The SunSPOT processor board has a 2.4GHz radio with an integrated antenna on the board. The radio is a TI CC2420 (formerly ChipCon) and is IEEE 802.15.4 which covers around 100m of wireless access [1]. The connectivity between a host server and the SunSPOTs are as shown in Fig. 2 below.

Fig. 1. Connection from server end to SunSPOT devices.

Possibilities of remote access to the SunSPOTs can be breakdown into two alternatives that can be either through the Internet cloud or through the GSM cloud, as illustrated by Fig. 3 below.

Fig. 2. Remote access options to smart home devices, from client end to server end.

The proposed mobile access remote control will be an application embedded in a mobile phone device.

3.1 Remote Access Through the Internet 3.1.1 Basic functionalities of the end product The basic functionalities and action sequence that needs to be implemented are as displayed in Fig. 3. Communication between SunSPOT devices and host server should begin once server is started while communication between client application and host server is started arbitrarily.

Fig. 3. Action sequence of an open communication between a mobile device and a smart home sensor

In developing the application across all platforms, a few key aspects need to be noted so that the applications can smoothly interface with each other. 1) Client end : mobile devices A mobile device, as its namesake, is mobile and must be assumed to be constantly on the move. As such we must keep in mind that the internet connection that it is utilizing, be it over UMTS or Wi-Fi, will not be permanent. The user should always be notified in cases of lost communication with the host server. 2) Server end (host): The server end is the most important application as it interfaces with both the smart home device and the client devices; as such it needs to be robust and reliable.

There must be at least two concurrent threads running, one for listening to broadcasts from the sensors and one for listening to any possible connection requests from a client on a mobile device. The server application should be able to accept multiple connections requests at one time, and to be able to handle each clients termination from the connection smoothly. In the enhanced project prototype, a third concurrent thread is added so that the GSM modem attached to the server can run in the background to intercept any incoming command via SMS. 3) Sunspot devices: The application on this device should be lightweight and simple. The free range sunSPOT needs to periodically read and transmit its sensor reading to the base station. Any other functionality such as calculation of maximum/minimum temperature and recording of sensor logs should be done at the server/host portion. 3.2 Remote Access through GSM network This method is another alternative to extend the remote access range of a smart home network. The host server will be equipped with a GSM modem to enable communication to client mobile devices through the GSM network cloud, bypassing the Internet connection entirely. While the Internet connection on a mobile device is dependent on network coverage, i.e. a Wi-Fi hotspot or UMTS subscription, it also means that the mobile device used must be a high end model with access to the Internet and with browser capabilities; i.e. a pocket pc or a smart phone. Although most of the current generation of released mobile phone models nowadays have this capability, it will be an added advantage if the application can also work without being dependable on an Internet connection. Sending and receiving commands to smart home devices through the GSM network will require the use of Short Messaging Service, SMS and hence will be a more expensive solution as compared to the use of Internet. However, with this solution, lower end mobile phone models, in fact any mobile phone that can send out SMS, will be able utilise the smart home remote access application. It can also be a good alternative for the user to use in cases where Internet coverage is not available for the mobile phone.

3.2.1

Application Sample : Project prototype

Example of possible implementation of remote access to smart home devices through mobile phones over the Internet cloud is displayed in Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 below. Fig 8 shows an example of reading data sensor, utilising SMS over GSM network.

Fig. 4. Temperature sensor Fig. 5. Lighting control

Fig. 6. SMS commands

4 Conclusion
To put it all in a nutshell, the objective of this project is to explore the possibilities of extending the remote access range of a smart home network. Two alternatives has been identified that can enable a truly remote solution to a tested sensor, that is by using the Internet network and the cellular network. The developed application has been able to achieve both of the proposed alternatives and is able to remotely retrieve sensor data through the Internet and GSM network. Comparison can be made between the two alternatives, in terms of its reliability in achieving a successful end to end communication, speed of response, security, costs and convenience. Extending the range of access for home devices will ultimately means increasing the possibility of illegal intrusion to the home sensor network. In order to safeguard the connection between a user and the home devices, security measures such as encryption and identity validation needs to be applied on the communication link, regardless of whether the communication is through the Internet or the GSM network. As future work, security options to resolve this issue can be discussed, tested and implemented, to further enhance this application. Acknowledgment We would like to thank Professor Zhili Sun and Rahim Tafazolli for their kind support.

References
1. Guy Dewsbury, Karen Clarke, Mark Rouncefield, Ian Sommerville, Dependability (DIRC) Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations, Home Technology Systems, Housing Care and Support Journal, Volume 5, 2002. 2. Project Sun SPOT, Small Programmable Object Technology, www.sunspotworld.com 3. Technology Generation Daily, Trend Watch News, 60% of world population now has cell phone, http://www.tgdaily.com 4. Nokia Home Control Center, Product Brochure, 2006-2008, http://smarthomepartnering.com