Design and Implementation of an IoT-Based Home Automation Architecture for Energy Efficiency and Device Management

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for home automation, based on the IOT which unifies the diverse smart devices at the device level, middleware level, and through a cross-platform web interface at the application level. It integrates a smart water meter, smart energy meter, and smart lighting nodes developed on the ESP8266 hardware utilizing Node.js, React.js for the front end, and communicating through HTTP(S), MQTT, and WebSocket. Testing was conducted over a 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.11n LAN for three days. In total, thirty thousand device-to-middleware message exchanges and three thousand command-response tests were conducted. The middleware processing delay was 1.08 +/- 0.31 ms and the average end-to-end command acknowledgement delay was 18.7 ms. First-attempt packet delivery was 99.97%; all 10 transient errors were recoved by automatic retransmission, resulting in 100% application-level fininish. Delivery of notification within the timeframe was 98.7%. Simultaneous protocol tests produced average latencies of 24.6 ms for HTTP(S), 17.8 ms for MQTT, and 13.7 ms for WebSocket. Automated switching and idle-load disconnection decreased energy consumption over a seven day period from 64.8kWh to 56.1kWh, representing a 13.4% decrease. Meter readings stayed within 2% of the reference meters. The results illustrate a low-cost, secure, interoperable, and robust architecture for managing the energy and devices of a residential user.