Towards a more reliable and scalable architecture for smart home environments

The Internet of things (IoT) has profoundly changed the way we imagine information science and architectures and smart homes are an important part of this domain. Created a decade ago, the few existing prototypes use technologies of the day, forcing designers to create centralized and costly architectures raising issues concerning reliability, scalability as well as ease of access, which cannot be tolerated in the context of assistance. To answer this specific problematic, we propose, in this paper, a new kind of smart home architecture based on a highly distributed environment. We showed that our novelty brings a lot fewer Single Point of Failure (SPoF) to ensure the best reliability achievable in this kind of smart environment. Moreover, we tested our solution with a custom-messaging protocol specifically developed for this kind of architecture to demonstrate that it can achieve at least the same performance in terms of messages per second and quantity of exchanged information than our old centralized smart home architecture.