Internet of Things Cloud Framework for Smart Homes

Smart appliances and renewable energy resources are becoming an integral part of smart homes. Nowadays, home appliances are communicating with each other with home gateways, using existing short-range home area network communication protocols such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, RFID, and WiFi. A Gateway allows homeowners and utilities to communicate remotely with the appliances via long-range communication networks such as GPRS, WiMax, LTE, and power liner carrier. This paper utilizes the Internet of Things (IoT) concepts to monitor and control home appliances. Moreover, this paper proposes a framework that enables the integration and the coordination of Human-to-Appliance, Utility-to-Appliance, and Appliance-to-Appliance. Utilizing the concepts of Internet of Things leads to one standard communication protocols, TCP/IPV6, which overcomes the many diverse home area networks and neighborhood area networks protocols. This work proposes a cloud based framework that enables the IoTs integration and supports the coordination between devices, as well as with device-human interaction. A prototype is designed, implemented, and tested to validate the proposed solution.