Gateway device for energy-saving cloud-enabled smart homes

In this paper we present a solution of a gateway device for smart homes with the ability to interact with IPv6-enabled home devices over 6LoWPAN, answering to the need for the creation of ubiquitous, energy-saving home networks. The gateway also supports the traditional IPv4 interfacing over WiFi and Ethernet. UPnP over IPv6 is fully enabled so that all devices can be easily found by the UPnP discovery from any node in the network. Finally, the gateway enables the devices to be visible by a cloud server, which in turn enables a variety of web applications for home control to interact with home devices by using asynchronous API calls. In the paper the details of the proposed cloud-enabled smart home architecture are given, including the realization of the gateway device, 6LoWPAN end nodes and basic cloud services demonstration applications.