Page 41 - ITU Journal Future and evolving technologies Volume 2 (2021), Issue 5 – Internet of Everything

ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies, Volume 2 (2021), Issue 5

FROM DESIGN TO PROTOTYPING IN THE INTERNET OF THINGS: A DOMOTICS CASE STUDY

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Sabrina Sicari , Alessandra Rizzardi , Alberto Coen‑Porisini 1
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Dipartimento di Scienze Teoriche e Applicate, Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, via O. Rossi 9 ‑ 21100 Varese (Italy)
NOTE: Corresponding author: Sabrina Sicari, sabrina.sicari@uninsubria.it

Abstract – Nowadays, the capability of rapidly designing and prototyping, simple, yet real domotics systems (e.g., smart
homes and smart buildings applications) is even more compelling, due to the availability and increasing spread of Inter‑
net of Things (IoT) devices. Home automation services enable the remote monitoring of indoor environments and facilities.
The main advantages include saving energy consumption and improving the overall management (and users’ experience)
in certain application domains. The pervasive adoption and diffusion of such remote monitoring solutions is hampered by
the timing required for design, prototyping and further developing applications and underlying architecture, which must be
often customized on the basis of speci ic domains’ needs and involved entities. To cope with this issue, the paper proposes
the analysis and prototyping of a domotics case study, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of proper IoT‑related tools in
speeding up the testing phase.

Keywords – Domotics, Internet of Things, monitoring application, prototyping
1. INTRODUCTION ing the realization of such IoT infrastructures, from the
design towards the developmentphase, areneeded. Their
Applications for indoor and remote monitoring are nowa‑ scope is representing all the components acting within
days adopted in different domains, ranging from smart the envisioned environment, so as to give an overview
homes to smart of ices, and tailored to many scopes, of the whole system before real deployment, in a limited
such as minimizing possible local mismanagement and scale. Hence, this paper proposes the use of different sup‑
wastage of resources. Moreover, in order to reduce porting tools, targeted at the IoT, providing a representa‑
the negative in luences of buildings on the environment, tive case study related to domotics.
green building, which is also known as sustainable build‑ The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Sec‑
ing, has begun to spread, aimed at at creating a better in‑
tion 2 investigates the actual state‑of‑the‑art tools and
door environmental quality for occupants, while reducing methods used by the researchers for validating remote
natural resources consumption [1]. monitoring systems, thus revealing our motivations. Sec‑
Different technologies concur to the realization of re‑ tion 3 presents the technologies and tools adopted for in‑
mote monitoring applications, which are strictly related vestigating the case study, which is detailed in Section 4.
to the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. They include Finally, Section 5 ends the paper, drawing some hints for
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Wireless Multimedia the direction of future research.
Sensor Networks (WMSN), Near Field Communication
(NFC), Radio‑Frequency Identi ication (RFID), actuators, 2. RELATED WORKS
and communication protocols such as Message Queue
Telemetry Transport (MQTT), ZigBee, Constrained Appli‑ A well‑investigated ield in remote controlling is that of
cation Protocol (CoAP), 6LowPAN (IPv6 over Low‑Power e‑health [4] [5], ranging from the monitoring of chronic
Wireless Personal Area Networks), and so on [2]. The ba‑ diseases, to vital signs current status monitoring, and, i‑
sic idea behind the IoT paradigm is the possibility of ac‑ nally, to the triage prioritization of patients.
quiring heterogeneous kinds of information from the en‑ Other solutions available concern smart buildings, which
vironment where IoT devices are placed. Such devices mainly include smart homes and smart of ices. The work,
presented in [6], uses real data‑sets, collected from exist‑
embed both sensing and actuating capabilities, which
ing smart homes (i.e., reporting information such as en‑
make them “smart” and enable them to interact with the
ergy consumption, lighting, heating, and so on), for test‑
surrounding environment. Such features allow the IoT
system to share a huge amount of information through‑ ing a middleware conceived to evaluate the security of the
out the network and the Internet. Such data can be used information, which is transmitted within the underlying
to provide customized services to the interested users [3]. IoT infrastructure. The middleware runs on Raspberry
1
Pi, and it is implemented in Node.js , while JSON formal
To achieve such a goal, the numerous technologies and 2
language and the MongoDB database are used for data
communication protocols, just mentioned above, should
often cooperate, in order to realize an ef icient IoT infras‑ exchange and storage, respectively.
tructure and to regulate the information exchange pro‑ 1 Node.JS. http://nodejs.org/
cess. Tools, simulators or testing‑platforms, for support‑ 2 MongoDB. http://www.mongodb.org/

© International Telecommunication Union, 2021 29