2017 IEEE 7th International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin)
Collection and Analysis of System Usage Data in
Smart Home Automation Systems
Sandra Ivanović, Sunčica Milivojša, Tatjana Erić
Faculty of Technical Sciences
University of Novi Sad
Serbia
Abstract—In this paper, we implement a basic solution for
collection and retrieval of usage data within the existing home
automation system. Data collection modules are implemented,
which run on the home automation gateway and within the home
automation cloud, and allow us to connect to the already existing
big data middleware platform. This represents the initial step in
building the extensive data storage and analysis component for
the existing home automation solution. The recorded data can be
used to enable various scenarios interesting for the end users,
such as detection of emergency situations and irregularities
within the system.
Keywords—data collection, big data, smart home automation
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the industries in possession of information and
data have significant advantage over competition. Therefore,
various mechanisms to collect and store system usage data are
developed and deployed. But, in the world where information
is not that of a challenge to obtain, it is often difficult to
differentiate between relevant and irrelevant data. After
deciding which data should be collected, and implementing
data collection mechanisms, the next step in the process would
be the analysis of this vast amount of data. This is where the
real challenge lies. Data processing and analysis tools must be
extremely reliable, efficient, and secure, but still fairly fast.
Data is usually stored across various clusters and replicated for
security and efficiency reasons.
In this paper, we focus on data collection and analysis for
the purpose of the existing home automation (HA) system [1]-
[3]. Devices within the HA system can be divided in two
categories: actuators and sensors. Actuators are the devices
that can be controlled by the system users, such as lights,
dimmers, plugs, etc. On the other hand, properties of sensor
devices can only be monitored by the user: temperature,
humidity, motion, smoke and more. The sensor devices within
HA system generate immense amount of data, as they are
constantly gathering new information. Actuators give us more
information about the user daily habits and routines, since they
do not only monitor environmental parameters, but are directly
controlled by the user. Therefore, distinguishing between
relevant and insignificant information is essential.
Our goal is to store data about the system usage, in order to
analyze it and enable some of the scenarios interesting for the
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 689947
978-1-5090-4014-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Milan Vidaković
Faculty of Technical Sciences
University of Novi Sad
Serbia
end users. For example, by storing and analyzing device
consumption and sensor data in the smart home environment,
the system learns about user’s daily habits. Based on the
detected patterns, the system can suggest actions or HA
system settings for the user. Irregular behaviors can also be
detected, and interpreted as emergency situations. Also,
recorded HA system history can simply be replayed within the
given time frame (days/weeks). This allows building scenarios
that mimic regular user behavior in cases when the household
is empty, in order to prevent intrusions.
As the first step towards building the extensive data
analysis framework, and enabling various scenarios mentioned
above, we want to add the cloud data collection service to the
existing HA system. The implemented data collection service
needs to perpetually monitor all the events within the
environment, and store them to the database. Over time, large
amounts of data will be stored and analyzed, in order to enable
functionalities like automatic adaptation of the system to user
habits, or detection of emergency situations. For the time
being, we will limit the analysis of data to simple monitoring
of the history within the given timeframe.
In this paper, we first present the architecture of the
existing HA system [1]-[3]. Then, we implement a basic data
collection and analysis solution, based on the existing big data
technologies [4]-[7], and the already available IoT middleware
platform [8]. Finally, we verify the functionality of the
solution.
II. HOME AUTOMATION SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
In this section, we first describe the architecture of the
existing HA system. Then, we identify the points within the
system, where the interface towards data collection service can
be implemented.
The architecture of the existing system is showed in Fig. 1.
As already said, devices within the HA system can be sensors
or actuators. We refer to all of the devices within the HA
system as nodes. All of the nodes in the system are connected
to the gateway [1]. Communication between the devices and
the gateway is mostly accomplished by IP, Z-Wave and
ZigBee protocols [2]. The HA gateway controls all of the
devices within the local network, and communicates with the
HA cloud [3]. HA cloud enables remote control of the HA
system, through the web interface and mobile applications.
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 2017 IEEE 7th International Conference on Consumer Electronics - Berlin (ICCE-Berlin)
Our goal is to build a cloud-based data collection service,
which can be accessed by all of the system users. As the nodes
within the HA system are produced by various manufacturers,
it is not possible to extend their functionality and enable them
to communicate directly with the data collection service. Also,
this would be highly inefficient. Therefore, either the HA
gateway or the HA cloud should collect all of the system
usage information, format it, and transfer to the data collection
service. In particular, it is better to offload this task to the HA
cloud, as the gateway device operates with low internal
storage and memory.
REMOTE NETWORK
HA CLOUD Mobile
Device
HOME NETWORK NODE
Mobile
HA Gateway
User Device
NODE
Fig. 1 – Architecture of the existing HA system
III. IMPLEMENTATION
In this section, we introduce the implementation of the data
collection service within the existing HA system.
The diagram of the implementation is presented in Fig. 2.
We implemented the data collection service within data
collection cloud, which runs independently from the existing
HA cloud. The implemented data collection cloud uses
KaaIoT platform as middleware [8]. This platform provides us
with the customizable and highly reliable server, which can
run within a cluster. The server handles the communication
with the database, and provides interface towards Cassandra,
MongoDB, MariaDB and PostgreSQL. Since HA data is of
variable length and structure, we decided to use a NoSQL
database. In particular, we chose Cassandra over MongoDB,
due to its higher throughput [4], [5]. To perform simple data
retrieval and monitor logs from the desired timeframe, we
used Zeppelin [8].
To enable the communication of endpoints with Kaa
server, it was necessary to implement the data collection
modules within every endpoint. In our case, we did not want
single home network nodes to communicate with Kaa server
individually. Instead, we implemented data collection modules
only within HA cloud that communicates with HA gateway, as
depicted in Fig. 2.
By default, Kaa platform provides SDKs for C, C++, Java
and Objective C endpoint applications. The existing HA cloud
is written in Node.js. In order to build the data collection
module for HA cloud, we created a Node.js add-on, exposing
the C++ SDK functionality, according to [10].
978-1-5090-4014-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Log upload strategy is set in a way that HA cloud
communicates with Kaa server.
LIGHT SENSOR
SMART
PLUG
DATA COLLECTION CLOUD
DATA COLLECTION
HA GATEWAY
CASSANDRA
MODULE
C++ SDK KAA
DB
STRUCTURED DATA SERVER
ZEPPELIN INSTANCE
DASHBOARD
HA CLOUD
STRUCTURED DATA
DATA COLLECTION MODULE
NODE.JS SDK
Desktop
Computer
User
Fig. 2 – HA system with data collection and analysis cloud
IV. TESTING
NODE
To validate the implementation, we performed the simple
test of logging the temperature from sensor. The HA cloud
NODE
based data collection module periodically checked the
temperature from the sensor, and sent it to data collection
NODE
cloud. Besides the actual sensor reading, all logs contained the
timestamp, information about the user, and the unique ID of
the sensor device within the HA system. Logs were
successfully delivered, and the log history could be observed
in Zeppelin dashboard. Log delivery time ranged between 5
ms and 9 ms, with the 6.05 ms average.
V. CONCLUSION
By using the Kaa middleware platform, we managed to
quickly enable data collection mechanism within the existing
HA system, and validate its functionality. Further work will be
focused on building the extensive data collection and analysis
component of the existing HA system.
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