Design of Home Energy Gateway boosting the development of Smart Grid applications at Home

Smart Grids provide an effective and efficient management of production, transmission, distribution and usage of electricity. One of the main issues in designing applications for Smart Grids is the need to cope with a plethora of different devices, communication protocols and data representations. This paper presents the design of a Home Energy Gateway (HEG) that abstracts heterogeneous devices and communication protocols and can be used to develop intelligent applications following a technology-agnostic approach. It is especially conceived to take over efficient energy management at home. Main design issues of our framework are the ability to automatically discover available devices and appliances, to track their operational status, to support different communication protocols and paradigms and to run concurrently multiple services. As an example of service, we address the implementation of a Network Connectivity Proxy (NCP), which save energy by letting unused ICT devices to remain into low-power states without losing their presence on the network. Further, some preliminary results based on the aforementioned service are also presented.