A Case Study on the Trade-Offs between Security, Scalability, and Efficiency in Smart Home Sensor Networks

This paper presents the design of a case study that examines the trade-offs between security, scalability and efficiency for sensor networks in IoT environments. Among the trade-offs we will investigate throughput and real-time response for sensor data collected by wireless sensors and transmitted into a scalable Cloud environment for storage and processing. The case study will be performed on a Smart Home prototype system developed at the University of West Florida that functions as a testbed system of a comparable IoT environment. The Smart Home prototype system provides sensor network and sensor data collection and processing services designed to infer activities in a home but it lacks security and scalability of its services. We anticipate that results of the case study will provide generalizable insight into the design of secure and scalable IoT applications.