Energy management of smart homes over fog-based IoT architecture

Abstract

Existing research studies on home automation systems mostly conserve energy by modeling the occupancy of users within home. Some others apply statistical approaches on the survey data about usage of appliances. Consequently, these research works either reduce wastage of electricity through automation or achieve energy efficiency based on appliances’ usage estimations. However, they do not provide energy consumption modeling which is human comfort centric and also validated through practical implementation in real-world smart homes. We present a Markov-chain-based probabilistic model to obtain users stochastic activity patterns which are used to forecast the energy consumption in a smart home environment. These predictions are then leveraged by our novel comfort aware energy saving mechanism named as prediction- and feedback-based proactive energy conservation (PF-PEC) algorithm. The PF-PEC algorithm reduces the total energy consumption while ensuring standard human comfort. Furthermore, a fog-based Internet of Things (IoT) architecture is implemented and deployed in a smart home to efficiently incorporate the proposed algorithm in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show up to 36% energy conservation, marking substantial reduction in daily electricity usage.