A fog-enabled smart home solution for decision-making using smart objects

The development of new smart objects for the sensing and actuation of a given place or environment led both the academia and industry to research and propose new protocols and intelligent systems to support such objects. One of the systems that has been gaining prominence is the smart residential environments. In this context, homes are equipped with smart objects to manage the living resources. However, managing such objects in residential environments requires data contextualization, i.e. collecting data from heterogeneous devices and actuate on the environment through context information generated from such data. To solve this problem, we propose an intelligent decision system based on the fog computing paradigm, which provides an efficient management of residential applications. The proposed solution is evaluated both in simulated and real environments. When compared with other studies from the literature in a simulated environment, the proposed solution shows a higher success rate with a lower delay in the decision-making process, higher efficiency in information dissemination with a lower overhead in the communication infrastructure, and increased robustness in processing with a lower power consumption. These results are also observed when considering a real environment evaluation. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.