Development of a smart home ontology and the implementation of a semantic sensor network simulator: An Internet of Things approach

Internet of Things (IoT) is a network that consists of embedded objects communicating with each other, sense their environment and interact with it. The number of connected devices is increasing day by day and it is expected to reach 26 billion by 2020. There is a huge potential for the development of many applications in IoT. Up to now, the communication of agents in IoT is solved in different ways: non-IP solutions, IP-based solutions and recently by high level, middleware solutions. The diversity of sensors and the complexity of data heterogeneity are solved by use of ontologies in recent works. In this paper, we present a smart home sensor ontology we developed that is a specialized ontology based on the Semantic Sensor Networks (SSN) ontology. We also present a simulation environment we developed for a smart home case using our ontology and present early performance results.