Keywords

1 Introduction

Today, humans are addicted to technologies for their daily chores. Every household has more devices connected to the Internet with a uniquely assigned IP address, a combination of numbers used to locate the devices on the network. The operational messages routed to the devices are completely controlled and monitored via the Internet. The Internet follows some standardized protocols designed suitable for information and communication facilities [1, 2]. People can operate the household items from the outdoor location and manage smart communication between devices and application by linking the perfect architecture [3]. In M2H or M2M communication, a number of devices with varying levels of complexity can transmit through a gateway. IoT devices route information with different energy levels to the connected gateway at the same time [4]. Various technologies such as machine learning, pervasive computing, and artificial intelligence are used to recognize and record the activity of the people in their daily life. The research community focuses on the technical possibilities to be done and also the lack of interoperability of smart living devices.

2 Related Works

The home we live in or the place we work can act smart with automation control systems. Smart units of home are connected together with a user interface for interacting with the home appliances [1]. A “smart living” can be defined as a residence filled with technology expected to respond to the needs of the occupants. To promote the home occupant’s comfort, convenience, and security, interfaces such as gateway or middleware are built inside smart home. Smart living network is constructed with three types. (1) through wired home electric line network, (2) through separate physical line network for signal transporting, and (3) through a wireless network. The wired networks have their own strength and weakness to connect the source and destination, but the wireless networks provide more advantages than the other two. Smart sensors are designed to sense gas leakages, temperature, recognize the face, energy consumption, humidity, control television, door lock status, doorbell, refrigerator storage sensors, light intensity, smoke, etc., continuously in regular intervals within range and send alerts to the authorized user [2].

A report is released by “TELECOMMUNICATION ENGINEERING CENTRE” that explains the year-wise changes in how the society adopted to the automation of smart living in their everyday life [5]. Using the data sent by the sensors, specialized software or intelligent processing agents trigger actions in the environment by means of actuators. For example, the sensor can smell smoke by air sampling technique, and if any smoke is detected by the sensor, it warns the proprietor via SMS and sends alerts to the nearby fire station [3]. The middleware is used for their inter-communicability [4]. A smart living control can handle enormous heterogeneous devices in the homes and provide user-oriented services like monitoring adult, elders, or kids by using appropriate algorithms [6, 7]. Smart living is constructed with inter-networks of three blocks [8]. They are:

  1. 1.

    Home Automation System (HAS), an outline that shows the inter-linking of home appliances (e.g., refrigerator, heaters, lights, televisions, and so on)

  2. 2.

    Home Controlling System (HCS), an application, which creates automated commands based on the data sensed by the sensor attached to home appliances and forwards the commands to the actuators to perform some operation.

  3. 3.

    Home Network System (HNS), a complete framework linkage of HAS and HCS communication to exchange information [8] (Fig. 1).

    Fig. 1
    figure 1

    Model picture of smart living [8]

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3 Home Framework Designing

The smart living is the projected output gained from the interaction of hardware and software. While designing smart living, there are three main concepts to be considered. They are smart objects participated in the device layer, hardware infrastructure that gives smart capabilities to the object, and finally software layer used to activate the smart capability [9]. Experts are arguing with the smart living functionality that seems to be a better system for managing everyday life. So, the instruments used are goal-oriented part for next-level development [10]. The following chart predicts the dimensional growth of technology in home from 1970 to 2025 [11] (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
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Growth of smart living automation

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3.1 Middleware or Gateway

Middleware is the part of the IoT system architecture which stands between the devices and application layer for providing services by effective communication. It is a software interface designed to transfer messages or queries between the device end and the user application end [12]. The server application detects the client’s geographical location and performs concurrent processing, balancing load and managing transactions by sharing client requests to multiple servers and providing fast access to resources using cyber security [13]. Different middleware types are used for connecting applications, web and cloud services for trigger-specific functions. Other components can communicate regardless of their medium using messaging frameworks like Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), web services, Representational State Transfer (REST), or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) [12, 14–19].

3.2 Communication Protocols

The smart living devices are designed to interface with low-bandwidth network than higher bandwidth. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineer (IEEE) working group enhanced the standards supporting M2M communication. In the local home network, different devices are connected with technologies to forward information in order to trigger the action. The wireless sensor networks (WSN) for the home are composed of numerous sensors and connected with different communication technologies [20]. They are as follows:

RFID

Radio frequency identification device (RFID) tags are like wireless microchips attached to the home objects or things. RFID has some in-built power and computational capacity, storage, and an antenna for connecting with the radio signal. The tags are read by the RFID reader. The RFID tags and readers can communicate via radio frequency waves to sense, detect, and communicate with the environment [2, 21, 22] (Table 1).

IEEE 802.11–WiFi

WiFi uses global 2.4 GHz UHF and 5 GHz SHF ISM radio bands. 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n activate on 2.4 GHz ISM band [20, 23, 24] (Table 1).

IEEE 802.15.4—ZigBee

ZigBee supports services like home network start-up, routing of messages in multi-hop model, and management of connection or disconnection of the nodes in the network.  Low-power energy consumption, cheap and easy installation procedure has no fixed network size and message routing [14, 20] (Table 1).

Z-Wave

In Z-Wave, each device has an identification code. The controller in the network recognizes the devices and determines its location by an embedded code. Then, the controllers increment the network routing table of representing the arrival. The Z-Wave protocol uses the Source Routing Algorithm (SAR) to route the messages in the fastest route. The sensor gateway/actuator gateway collects internal house data from sensors using Z-Wave. It operates between 868 and 900 MHz [14, 20] (Table 1).

IEEE 802.15.1—The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)

BLE is the latest version of the Bluetooth 4.0 specifications. It is highly efficient on low-power sensors. The frequency bandwidth of BLE is same as the classic Bluetooth protocol, but BLE modulation is slightly different which results in maximum signal strength [5, 25] (Table 1).

IEEE802.11ah—HaLow

HaLow is a low-cost WiFi standard specifically designed for IoT applications like smart living and smart grid automation with low cost of implementation with less power consumption. This standard provides greater flexibility of supporting more than 8000 devices on a single application for communication with capacity to cover different distance ranges [12, 14–19] (Table 1).

Table 1 Consolidated overview of communication protocol
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3.3 Home API

The application programming interfaces or APIs are the points of interaction (POI) between the smart devices and the Internet. Web services are the APIs designed for Internet of things (IoT). A web service is software that any application can parse it. Connected devices access the web services via address of the web API that has developer registration and API key control. The interfaces can be built using different languages such as SOAP, REST, or XML/JSON [25, 26].

3.4 Service Projects

There are numerous services offered by IoT projects. Some of the main services are specification, design, and provision service.

Monitoring home locators

Sensors are fixed for monitoring the physiological and behavioral parameters of the person continuously such as heart rate, blood pressure, mobility, and emotional and mental state of the person residing inside the house. Secure connection is established by decision-making algorithms and transmitting data via wireless body communication networks. Projects such as motion detection, location tracking, facial expression, reading urine, and sweat of the elderly or people with disability are highly possible in IoT environment today. These come under the type of provision services [11, 13, 27].

Surveillance and security systems

In smart living, cameras, alarms and locks are used to block unknown persons entering the home and allowing an authorized person to access the devices inside the home and make decisions of the personalized services available. It is possible to analyze the images through face recognition algorithm and cryptographic keys [15]. The camera sensor tracks the happenings of home, especially useful for monitoring from far location.

Gesture Recognition Project

Gesture or hand movement models are stored in the middleware database for authorization process [20]. The gestures which are stored for authenticity are recognized using algorithms specially designed for template matching and control home things remotely. These algorithms compare the actual image with the template sign to find the match. In order to recognize the characters, numbers and objects templates are used. The templates are searched from the database based upon the size of the image.

Indoor positioning energy efficiency projects

Devices not linked directly with the middleware use some software proxies for connecting. The power meter is such a proxy used for linking devices done with the user mobile platform and middleware for analyzing, monitoring, and controlling the device. Readymade projects such as semantic smart metering and semantic web technology are used to link power-related data semantically. This project is used for public buildings and private houses. Nowadays, power banks, smart grids, and solar energy are used to replace electricity used for smart living. Environmental pollution could also be avoided [26].

Energy Management

Household energy usage is one of the major impacts on the world’s energy consumption [5, 11, 13, 20, 27, 28]. The home system with smart capability consumes more energy than normal houses. The energy management of home is how, when, and where the home appliances are to be activated, deactivated, and controlled [20, 29].

4 Proposed Interoperability in Living Network System

Smart living is an integration of various physical sensors and communication technology. Choosing the right communication protocol between devices improves the overall system performance [26]. Interoperability is the communication trade-off between heterogeneous devices. In the architecture of living network system (see Fig. 3), devices are arranged in the physical layer which forwards the event happens inside the home through the communication protocols and reaches the routers. The routers route the messages to the API. Depending upon the user response, the API triggers the action in the living system through the intermediate middleware [26].

Fig. 3
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Proposed smart living network system with efficient use of power energy to avail interoperability

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A good interoperability is established by following good protocols in each and every layer of the living system network. No two layers allotted to do same job. A relay of work shuffled in the architecture. The communication between layers takes place through the communication protocols, application programming interface protocols, and the gateway protocols. Uninterrupted power is supplied to the home network to avoid interruption. The devices involved in this network have limited power storage facility. Due to the mobility of the locators, location-based search is helpful, so there is a need of battery backup to avoid interruption from outside. If all the layers are united finely in the network but still has a huge loss of energy, then the entire network is unnecessary one. The energy supplied to every device in the network is based on the preferences of the user. Automatic supply of power energy to the device is dynamic based on the time changes (e.g., door sensor and camera of indoor and outdoor are preferred more than fan and air conditioner in the far location).

The energy manager is a component involved in energy management application. It depends on the communication from the power meter, and the middleware in the energy unit translates the messages between the participating device and the API, which are designed for energy management. If the external power energy is not available, the device can get charge from the artificial power source such as UPS battery. From the energy management API, the user can able to be aware of the energy state and get information based on the device energy consumption, and based on this locator, the devices consume power. It is concluded from the proposed smart living network that power energy is efficient for the working condition of the framework interoperability. Based on the range of communicating distance, suitable protocols such as ZigBee and HaLow are highly used nowadays for smart living mesh network [25].

5 Research Consideration

The sensors are the spies used to gather real-life scenario and trigger action accordingly, to provide security and safety to the locators. It is necessary to find the user-centric, low-cost, innovative, interoperable, and integrated home environment by focusing on industry standards. Middleware or building gateway is the syntactic and semantic perspective of the project. Interfaces involved must improve the interoperability among the participating layers. Designing and controlling home smartly improves the quality of life and avoids thefts by the timely information exchange in a critical situation; intimation of leakage of gas or fire is done automatically by enhancing the routing protocols involved in the network system for interoperability.

6 Conclusion

The invention of the information communication technology has brought major changes in our everyday life. Smart living has a high potential in the present and future business sector platform. Various impacts noted on intelligent living places such as complexity in construction, inflexibility in connection, power energy demands, interoperability problem among the devices, lack of managing appliances are considered as the key barriers to their adoption. Numerous researches are undertaken at IoT projects, but confidence building on smart living is still very low for the users because of the cost, safety, and security risks. Initially and very importantly, home appliances require fine connecting gateway and the server requires high energy harvesting techniques and interoperability features for enhanced continuous flow of interaction more than security constraints. This paper acknowledged the need of power energy to establish interoperability supported by well-designed and flexible protocol standards that can accurately and continuously infer the physiological activities and patterns of sensed data.