Ethereum based blockchain implementation in home automation for decentralized device to device communication

Abstract

Home automation recently started becoming a commodity due to the advancement of computer design and manufacturing, making it cheap for common folks. Home automation devices allow home appliances, such as television, air conditioner and refrigerator, to be connected to the internet; providing innovative and smart services to humans. Many state-of-the-art IoT is highly centralized and not necessarily suited for home IoT because of the difficulty of scaling, the many-to-one nature of traffic, and the single point of failure. Centralization also forces us to trust the provider of a service. As for smart home devices, it is more trivial to protect and secure our privacy at home, which is very private and personal. To guarantee a completely trusted, transparent environment, we propose a blockchain decentralized solution for smart homes. The advantageous features of Blockchain are decentralization, anonymity, and security. These can be beneficial to IoT, adding more security layers and relieving dependence on the central server. However, as evident from the operation of Bitcoin businesses, existing Blockchain cannot directly be applied to IoT applications expected from homes or industries because of real-time operation and memory consumption. Therefore, a decentralized Ethereum-based private home automation platform with sufficient real-time performance for home use is needed. In this research, the implementation of blockchain for home automation using Ethereum is developed as an intermediary for data exchange between home devices. To fit various types of device computing power, the node is configured as an active node and a passive node while still maintaining the decentralized communication between devices. Using a private blockchain, the private operation and data of the user are confined between user IoT devices and maintain speed. The developed scheme IoT operations, memory consumption and real-time operation by measuring one-way communication are compared to a centralized scheme made using MQTT protocol and is shown to be competitive in terms of speed with just 7ms slower in latency. However, it comes with a drawback, in which its storage memory usage expands for every 3-4 transactions; yet with future improvement such as routine storage clean-up this shortcoming can be overcome. Finally, some recommendations and future works are laid out to improve the performance and pave a road to guide future blockchain research related to home automation and IoT.