Cloud-enabled home automation gateway with the support for UPnP over IPv4/IPv6 and 6LoWPAN

The most recent requests for interoperability between the different devices within a home automation system have brought IP-based protocols to the attention in this area. However, a number of hurdles need to be overcome so that the IP connection to home devices could become enabled, the most important being the requests for a large address space and low power consumption. In this paper we present a solution of a home gateway device with the ability to interact with IPv6-enabled home devices over 6LoWPAN, with regard to the increased address space and low power consumption, respectively. Additionally, the gateway supports the traditional IPv4 interfacing over WiFi and Ethernet. UPnP over IPv6 is fully enabled so that all the devices can be easily found by UPnP discovery from any node in the network. Finally, the gateway populates the discovered devices to a cloud server, which in turn enables a variety of web applications for home control to interact to home devices by using asynchronous API calls.