Zone-aware service system with nomadic resources for cost-effective pervasive infrastructure

The context-aware service system (CASS) for smart home services has received considerable attention due to advances made in context-awareness technologies. In recent years, various context-aware consumer electronics for intelligent and personalized user-centric services have been introduced. However, the conventional CASS has architectural limitations, including low availability, low interoperability, and low scalability. For example, it is difficult to modify or update the context-aware service (CAS) infrastructure once it has been built. Therefore, this paper proposes a zone-aware service system (ZASS) for cost-effective pervasive infrastructure. The main component of the ZASS is a zone-aware service agent (ZASA) which utilizes the user´s nomadic resource as a sensor or gateway. The term `user´s nomadic resource´ refers to the user´s hand-held device, which has a sensing or networking capability, such as a smartphone, smart watch, and mobile sensor, etc. As the utilization of the user´s nomadic resource, the ZASS can be cost-effectively implemented compared with the conventional CASS. The performance of the proposed system is discussed via a simple smart home service scenario. The experimental result showed that the proposed system can reduce the power consumption of an air conditioner by 20.7%.