Iotivity Cloud-enabled Platform for Energy Management Applications

Abstract

In developing countries today, population growth and the penetration of higher standard of living appliances in homes has resulted in a rapidly increasing residential load. In South Africa, the recent rolling blackouts and electricity price increase only highlighted this reality calling for sustainable measures to reduce the overall consumption and peak load. The dawn of the smart grid concept, embedded systems and ICTs have paved the way to novel HEMS design. In this regard, the Internet of Things (IoT), an enabler for smart and efficient energy management systems is seeing increasing attention for optimizing HEMS design and mitigate its deployment cost constraints. In this work, we propose an IoT platform for residential energy management applications focusing on interoperability, low-cost, technology availability and scalability. We focus on the backend complexities of IoT Home Area Networks (HAN) using the OCF IoTivity-Lite middleware. To augment the quality, servicing and reduce cost and complexities, this work leverages open-source Cloud technologies from Back4App as BaaS to provide consumer and Utilities with a data communication platform within an experimental study illustrating time and space agnostic “mind-changing” energy feedback, Demand Response Management (DRM) and appliance operation control via a HEM App via an Android smartphone.

Enhanced Interoperating Mechanism Between OneM2M and OCF Platform Based on Rules Engine and Interworking Proxy in Heterogeneous IoT Networks

“…Data is sent to the server via Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and organized to the resource model of the OCF standard. Mandza et al [38] designed a home energy management system using the IoTivity-Lite platform (a lighter version of IoTivity for constrained devices). It is suitable for older devices and it is cost-effective and easy to scalability.…”