Use case – deploying home automation

Typical home automation deployments provide a combination of the following feature sets:

• Controlling and monitoring appliances, such as air conditioners, refrigerators, or heaters
• The controlling of lights (on/off, a change of color or brightness, or on/off based on a person’s presence)
• An action based on a detected event (for example, an alarm/buzzer sounding when smoke is detected)
• The remote operation of doors and windows
• The detection of an intruder that triggers an alarm
• Conversations with smart speakers

The following figure gives a representational view of home automation implementation:

Figure 4.1 – Sensors/actuators in a home automation use case

As you can see, devices that are battery-operated and have low bandwidth requirements typically transfer data on an energy-efficient protocol (for example, Zigbee), whereas devices such as a video camera send the data...