Vision: towards an extensible app ecosystem for home automation through cloud-offload.

ABSTRACTHome security and automation---temperature, lighting and energy management, access control, and alarming---is an area of growth in residential and office settings. These systems typically include a number of sensors and actuators connected to a controller that runs the automation software. For cost reasons, these home controllers are often resource constrained devices that are not easy to upgrade or replace at scale. But with the emergence of more capable sensors, there is a need for applications that require significant amounts of computing resources, e.g., video feeds from cameras being used to identify people and their activities. The limited resources at the home controller makes it hard to deploy such applications, especially when numerous ones are being used concurrently. This problem is reminiscent of applications on mobile phones that necessitate cloud off-load. However, we posit that home control applications pose a new set of requirements unique to this domain. In this paper, we motivate a few such requirements including the need for disconnected operation and an offload decision engine with system-wide visibility, and propose an architecture to address them.