An Extensible Home Automation Architecture Based on Cloud Offloading

Current home security and automation systems are typically structured as a collection of sensors and actuators connected to a local home controller. While new and more capable sensors are driving increasingly sophisticated applications such as video surveillance that require significant computing resources, home controllers are often resource-constrained devices that are not easy to upgrade or replace at scale. To address these limitations, we present a new Cloud-Enhanced Home Controller (CEHC) architecture where the resources of the local home controller are augmented with external cloud resources accessed over the network. While such cloud offloading has been studied in the context of other resource-constrained devices such as mobile phones, we posit that home control applications pose a new set of requirements unique to this domain. Here, we describe these requirements, propose an application ecosystem that enables the seamless use of both local and remote resources, and describe a decision engine that schedules applications under constraints imposed by the home controller, the network, and the costs associated with the cloud service provider.