e2Home: A Lightweight Smart Home Management System

Most of the latest system for controlling home appliance remotely have used web server as the interface between users and home network. Although the system that adopts web server offers many advantages, this approach requires a fix IP (Internet Protocol) address and remote users require high-speed connection in order to access the web interface due to the heavy loaded Graphical User Interface (GUI) and interactive components of the web interface. To alleviate the above problem, we have developed e2Home which enable remote user to manage smart home appliances in connection scarce environment. e2Home uses email as the communication medium between users and home network. In this paper, we describe the concept and design of e2Home. We also demonstrate the feasibility experiment by implementing e2Home with cost-effective home appliance controller and mobile robot. The result of our implementation shows that e2Home is feasible to be applied in smart home environment.