Leveraging Physical Locality to Integrate Smart Appliances in Non-Residential Buildings with Ultrasound and Bluetooth Low Energy Jonathan Furst¨ ∗, Kaifei Cheny, Mohammed Aljarrah∗ and Philippe Bonnet∗ ∗IT University of Copenhagen, yUC Berkeley
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[email protected] Abstract—Smart appliances and sensors have become widely Manufactor Potocols available. We are deploying them in our homes to manage the level of comfort, energy consumption or security. While such smart appliances are becoming an integral part of modern Manufactor home automation systems, their integration into non-residential Gateways buildings is problematic. Indeed, smart appliance vendors rely on the assumption that the Local Area Network (LAN) guarantees Manufactor locality and a single unit of use/administration. This assumption Clouds is not met in non-residential buildings, where the LAN infras- tructure might cover one or several buildings, and where several organizations or functional units are co-located. Worse, directly Smart Appliances Manufactor Apps coupling smart appliances to the Internet opens up a range of security issues as device owners have very little control over Fig. 1. Current Home Appliance IoT State the way their smart appliances interact with external services. In order to address these problems, we propose a solution that couples the use and management of smart appliances often limited to few, physical switches (e.g., light switches). with physical locality. Put differently, we propose that smart appliances can be accessed via smartphones, but only from the However, various studies show that personal comfort and room they are located in. Our solution combines opportunistic energy consumption can be greatly improved by giving oc- connectivity through local Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with an cupants direct personal control and by raising their awareness ultrasound-based method for room level isolation.