Smart Comm: A Smart Home Middleware Supporting Information Exchange

Abstract

In the research it has been noticed a large interest in academia and industry related to the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Homes. Although there are several approaches utilizing those environments, no common consensus exists on technology and no standards for devices communication, data collection and processing exist. Therefore, in this work is conceived to tackle these challenges, which was coined as the Smart Comm middleware. This software approach was designed for use in an IoT environment, with special emphasis on smart homes. Thus, serving as a basis to support information exchange. The Smart Comm was developed in a scenario architecture adopting microservices. As a result, the communication between the gateway and IoT devices can be done considering a peer communication. This procedure can also be observed in the exchange information between Smart Comm. Therefore, bringing security, scalability and the flexibility to handle the variety of devices. Targeting to demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the proposed middleware, an environment was developed to serve as a testbed for this research work.