Andreas Kamilaris

Exploring the use of DNS as a search engine for the Web of Things

Sensor technology is becoming pervasive in our everyday lives, measuring the real world around us. The Internet of Things enables sensor devices to become active citizens of the Internet, while the Web of Things envisions interoperability between these devices and their services. An important problem remains the need for discovering these devices and services globally, ad hoc in real-time, within acceptable time delays. Attempting to solve this problem using the existing Internet infrastructure, we explore the exploitation of the Domain Name System (DNS) as a scalable and ubiquitous directory mechanism for embedded devices. We examine the feasibility of this approach by performing a simulation involving up to one million embedded devices, to test system performance and scalability. Finally, we discuss practical issues and the overall potential of this approach.

The Smart Home meets the Web of Things

In recent years, the merging of computing with physical things, enabled the transformation of everyday objects into information appliances. We propose to reuse the central principles of the modern Web architecture to fully integrate physical objects to the Web and build an interoperable Smart Home. We present an application framework that offers support for multiple home residents concurrently. We show that by using the Web as application layer we can build flexible applications on top of heterogeneous embedded devices with only a few lines of code, transforming home automation into a trivial task. We address many issues related to Web-enabling these devices, from their discovery and service description to the uniform interaction with them. Our evaluation efforts indicate that our framework offers acceptable performance and reliability.

HomeWeb: An application framework for Web-based smart homes

Household appliances are being equipped with embedded micro-controllers and wireless transceivers, offering smart behavior. These augmented appliances form wireless networks and transform residential areas into smart homes. Advancements such as the effective penetration of the Internet in embedded computing and the promising practice of the Web of Things, allow the realization of Web-oriented smart homes. In a previous work, we developed a Web-based application framework for smart homes, supporting concurrent interaction from multiple family members. In this paper, we improve the functionality of our system by including a 6LoWPAN-based wireless sensor network inside the home environment, addressing issues such as device discovery and service description. Web techniques such as HTTP caching and push messaging, facilitate the efficient operation of a fully Web-based smart home. Through a technical evaluation, we show the benefits of directly Web-enabling embedded sensors in terms of performance and energy conservation. The development of a Web-based graphical application abstracts home automation procedure for typical residents.

Social networking of the Smart Home

Social networking on the Web has become an integral part of our lives. Merging of computing with physical things enabled the conversion of everyday objects into information appliances. This merging allows Smart Homes to offer new automation possibilities to their residents. We propose utilizing existing social networking infrastructures and their Web-based APIs in order to integrate Smart Homes to the Web, offering social status to physical devices. We exploit the functionality and the Web 2.0 technologies provided by Facebook to transform the interaction with the Smart Home into a shared, social experience. A preliminary technical evaluation indicates that our approach is feasible and it offers acceptable performance.

Building energy-aware smart homes using web technologies

New technological advancements allow the Internet to penetrate in embedded computing. IPv6 envisions to merge the physical and the digital world, through the Internet. The Web of Things interconnects the expanding ecosystem of Internet-enabled embedded devices, by reusing well-accepted and understood Web principles. In this work, the principles of the Web of Things are employed for the development of a comprehensive system for home automation. By combining sensor devices with residential smart power outlets, the foundational pillars are built towards energy-aware smart homes that operate with Web technologies. By designing an application framework for smart homes using request queues for communicating with home devices, reliability and time efficiency are ensured while prioritized requests can be easily included to the system and multiple simultaneous family members may be supported. A technical evaluation indicates that Web-enabled smart homes offer acceptable performance while modern Web techniques can contribute in facilitating and optimizing smart home operations and deployment. Finally, it is demonstrated through various case studies that Web-based, energy-aware smart homes have the potential to provide flexible solutions to challenges such as energy awareness, energy conservation and the integration of future smart homes to the smart grid of electricity.

Web messaging for open and scalable distributed sensing applications

Future Web applications will increasingly require real-time data from the physical world collected by a myriad of sensors and actuators. Currently, integration of such devices require customized solutions due to the lack of widely adopted protocols for devices. Because the Web architecture offers a high degree of interoperability and a low entry barrier, we propose to leverage the Web to build hybrid applications that combine the physical world with Web content. Our work builds upon recent developments in Web push techniques and extends them for embedded devices with a RESTful messaging system. Our results illustrate that fully Web-based distributed sensing applications are not only feasible - but actually desirable - because Web standards offer an ideal compromise between performance and functionality.

Lessons Learned from Online Social Networking of Physical Things

Social networking is a core part of the global online experience. The Web 2.0 has been transformed into a social Web, extending the social capabilities of users. A big challenge for the Web is to become ubiquitous, blended with the everyday life of people. The Pervasive Web would be effectively enabled when physical things are seamlessly connected to the Web, offering real-world services to users. In a previous work, we examined the feasibility of utilizing existing online social networking platforms, to create a social smart home that promotes sharing of sensor and household devices between family members. In this paper, we present some early experiences obtained from developing two real-world social applications, the first for environmental monitoring in a farm and the second for increasing energy awareness by sharing electricity consumption information between friends. Through these two deployments, we demonstrate the potential benefits of giving a social texture to pervasive applications.

The practice of online social networking of the physical world

A big challenge for the web is to become ubiquitous, blended with the everyday life of people. The pervasive web envisions seamless connectivity with the physical world, where embedded devices offer real-world services to the users. Social networking is a core part of the online experience. The Web 2.0 has become a social web, extending users’ social capabilities. Online social networking platforms have the capability to support numerous real-life applications, promoting the concept of sharing environmental services between relatives, friends or more generally groups of people that have common interests. In this paper, we investigate how the social web can be harnessed to facilitate the transit to a pervasive web. We examine this potential through four case studies: a smart home that promotes sharing of household devices between family members; a working environment where employees monitor a common area; a neighbourhood where neighbours compete for energy conservation; and a social application that allows people to compare their electricity footprint with their friends and their community. Through these case studies, we demonstrate the potential benefits of enhancing pervasive applications with social characteristics.

The impact of remote sensing on the everyday lives of mobile users in urban areas

Increasing urbanism creates serious ambient problems that downgrade the quality of life of citizens. Environmental awareness may help people to take more informed decisions in their everyday lives, ensuring their health and safety. The Web of Things is becoming a reality, as embedded sensors are being deployed in urban areas for environmental monitoring. These sensors are accessible and discoverable through the Web, and their services can be harnessed by mobile users on the go. In this paper, we perform a small case study, by using mini focus groups, to identify the impact of remote sensing on the everyday lives of users. By means of UrbanRadar, an application that discovers and interacts with environmental services offered by Web-enabled urban sensors, we investigate and discuss the acceptance, influence, usefulness and potential of these services to mobile users. Finally, based on the feedback from participants, we identify eleven design patterns, important for future mobile applications involving remote sensing.

OPLD: Towards improved non-intrusive office plug load disaggregation

Practical energy auditing in offices poses several challenges unlike homes e.g. physically large space, diverse energy appliances types, several appliance instances and occupancy non-obstructiveness. However, improved energy-auditing measures using predictive analytics can benefit energy savings and reduce building operational costs. A review of some publicly available energy datasets such as AMPds, BLUED, ECO, REDD etc. is presented to help understand practical limitations in relying and applying them alike for office plug load audits. A possible approach to predict miscellaneous electrical plug loads (MELs) is proposed using Office Plug Load Dataset (OPLD) based on empirical characteristics and measurements of MELs devices. This work in progress study is one of the first attempts to characterize office desktop appliances across multiple states through a very large experimental dataset. The dataset might be effective in identifying individual appliances & its states in aggregate signature. This can find promising application in improving our understanding on office MELs and thus disaggregating them from single-point measurement.