A Smart Gateway Architecture for Improving Efficiency of Home Network Applications

A smart home gateway plays an important role in the Internet of Things (IoT) system that takes responsibility for the connection between the network layer and the ubiquitous sensor network (USN) layer. Even though the home network application is developing rapidly, researches on the home gateway based open development architecture are less. This makes it difficult to extend the home network to support new applications, share service, and interoperate with other home network systems. An integrated access gateway (IAGW) is proposed in this paper which upward connects with the operator machine-to-machine platform (M2M P/F). In this home network scheme, the gateway provides standard interfaces for supporting various applications in home environments, ranging from on-site configuration to node and service access. In addition, communication management ability is also provided by M2M P/F. A testbed of a simple home network application system that includes the IAGW prototype is created to test its user interaction capabilities. Experimental results show that the proposed gateway provides significant flexibility for users to configure and deploy a home automation network; it can be applied to other monitoring areas and simultaneously supports a multi-ubiquitous sensor network.