A Smart Home Gateway Platform for Data Collection and Awareness

Smart homes have attracted much attention due to the expanding of IoT and smart devices. In this article, we propose a smart gateway platform for data collection and awareness in smart home networks. A smart gateway will replace the traditional network gateway to connect the home network and the Internet. A smart home network supports different types of smart devices, including in-home IoT devices, smartphones, smart electric appliances, and so on. A traditional network gateway is not capable of providing quality of service measurement, user behavioral analytics, or network optimization. Such tasks are traditionally performed with measurement agents such as optical splitters or network probes deployed in the core network. Our proposed platform is a lightweight plug-in for the smart gateway to accomplish data collection, awareness, and reporting. While the smart gateway is able to adjust the control policy for data collection and awareness locally, a cloud-based controller is also included for more refined control policy updates. Furthermore, we propose a multi-dimensional awareness plug-in framework to achieve accurate data awareness at the smart gateway. The efficiency of data collection and accuracy of data awareness of the proposed platform is demonstrated based on tests using actual data traffic from a large number of smart home users.