Resource-aware smart home management system by constructing resource relation graph

With the advent of smart home devices including Smart TV or smart appliances, home becomes smarter. Smart home is a complex environment where heterogeneous smart devices and appliances are connected to each other to provide various smart services. As the home environments become smarter and more complex, the need for an effective managing mechanism with minimum user´s intervention is growing. However, just only putting together all the individual information of each resource is not enough, since it is very hard to catch out overall home situation without the relation information between the managed resources. In this paper, we propose a resource-aware management system with hierarchical smart home resource model, using the home context information which defines the information convergence model of heterogeneous home resources and builds a home knowledge by constructing a resource relation graph. The proposed system can accelerate deployment of advanced future smart home service features such as context-aware dynamic service composition, autonomous fault management systems. In addition, it allows cost effective remote maintenance system with highly convenient manageability. We implemented the prototype system of our proposed architecture and evaluated the performance on the query response time of home resources and relations in a real environment. Results showed that it has acceptable performance for navigating or control of home information and excellent improvements in terms of relation based search. We anticipate that the proposed system will bring the huge benefits not only to the consumers, home network service providers but also to the home network maintenance companies in terms of ease of management, and diagnostic effectiveness.