Smart Home and Smart Metering.
IoT has large application
in home environments, where heterogeneous embedded
devices enable the automation of common in-house activities.
In this scenario, the Cloud is the best candidate for building
flexible applications with only a few lines of code, making
home automation a trivial task [39]. In order to let a variety
of independent single-family smart homes access reusable
services over the Internet, the resulting solution should satisfy
three crucial requirements [54]: internal network interconnection
(i.e., every digital appliance in smart home should
be able to interconnect with any other), intelligent remote
control (i.e., appliances and services in the smart home should
be intelligently manageable by any device from anywhere),
and automation (i.e., interconnected appliances within the
home should implement their functions via linking to services
provided by smart-home oriented Cloud). Several smart-home
applications proposed in literature involve (wireless) sensor
networks and implement smart metering solutions to provide
recognition of appliances [24], intelligent management of
energy consumption [24], lighting, heating, and air conditioning
[36]. Several issues must be resolved to materialize
this vision [36]. Home devices should be web-enabled, their
discovery and service description should be standardized, and
the interaction with them should be uniform. Administration
and control of devices could be leveraged by deploying more
powerful computing devices, acting as mediators among IoT
devices and Cloud components, for implementing complex
functionalities on top of them, mitigating the volume and the
frequency of communications with the Cloud.