A comparison of the popular home automation technologies

Home automation systems represent the front-end of smart grids, where the energy monitoring and control operations are enabled through smart devices installed in households and residential buildings. There are many home automation technologies available in the market, and the users are left to select their choice of best technology. Proper guidelines to their selection currently remain low. Therefore, in this paper, a comparison of popular home automation technologies is presented from user perspective to fill this void in the research literature, and to empower the users with more details based on the current home automation market. X10, Z-Wave, ZigBee, INSTEON, and EnOcean are the home automation technologies compared in this paper. Two indices are developed as the outcome of this paper to represent the performance and affordability of these technologies, as a guideline to the potential users. We find these technologies fit out a tradeoff of higher performance and price (Z-Wave) down to lower performance and price (X10). With this understanding, appropriate choices can be made.