An OS for Internet of Everything: Early Experience from A Smart Home Prototype

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1673-5188.2017.04.002

Abstract

Abstract:

The proliferation of the Internet of Everything (IoE) has pulled computing to the edge of the network, such as smart homes, autonomous vehicles, robots, and so on. The operating system as the manager of the computing resources, is also facing new challenges. For IoE systems and applications, an innovative operating system is missing to support services, collect data, and manage the things. However, IoE applications are all around us and increasingly becoming a necessity rather than a luxury. Therefore, it is important that the process of configuring and adding devices to the IoE is not a complex one. The ease of installation, operation, and maintenance of devices on the network unarguably plays an important role in the wide spread use of IoE devices in smart homes and everywhere else. In this paper, we propose Sofie, which is a smart operating system for the IoE. We also give the design of Sofie. Sofie can be implemented via different IoT systems, such as Home Assistant, openHAB, and so on. In order to implement Sofie to get some early experience, we leverage Home Assistant to build a prototype for the smart home. Our work shows that Sofie could be helpful for practitioners to better manage their IoE systems.

Key words: edge computing, IoE, smart home, operating system

CAO Jie, XU Lanyu, Raef Abdallah, SHI Weisong. An OS for Internet of Everything: Early Experience from A Smart Home Prototype[J]. ZTE Communications, 2017, 15(4): 12-22.

Figures/Tables 14

Figure 1. Comparison of mobile operating system, cloud, and Sofie.

Figure 2. Overview of Sofie.

Figure 3. Architecture of Sofie.

Figure 4. Design of Sofie at home.

Table 1 Comparison of smart home systems

	Language	Lines of code	Frontend	API	Data storage	Automation	Platform	Device abstraction	Data abstraction	Documentation
Home Assistant	Python3	213,901	HTML, iOS	Y	SQLite	Rules, Scripts	Linux, Win, Mac OS X	Y	N	Good
openHAB	Java	904,316	HTML, Android, iOS, Win	Y	Persistence services	Rules, Scripts	Any device with JVM	Y	N	Good
Domoticz	C++	645,682	HTML	Y	SQLite	Scripts	Linux, Win, Mac OS X	N	N	Poor
Freedomotic	Java	159,976	HTML	Y	Data persistence	Rules, Scripts	Any device with JVM	N	N	Good
HomeGenie	C#	282,724	HTML, Android	Y	SQLite	Scripts	Linux, Win, Mac OS X	N	N	Average
MisterHouse	Perl	690,887	NA	N	NA	Perl code	Linux, Win, Mac OS X	N	N	Poor

Figure 5. Architecture of Home Assistant.

Figure 6. Architecture of Sofie on top of Home Assistant.

Figure 7. Home Assistant user interface with life checking.

Figure 8. Python API example code for Sofie.

Figure 9. DB-API example code for Sofie.

Figure 10. ?Camera snapshots when light turns on/off.

Figure 11. Gray level histogram corresponding to the snapshots in Fig. 10.

Figure 12. Configuration file example code for Sofie.

Figure 13. Latency in turning on light.

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