Agent based system for home automation, monitoring and security

Abstract

Collecting data from sensors, for various applications and scenarios, is becoming a norm. Each sensor is connected to an Access Point (AP), which forwards the data to a host computer. When an AP fails, it causes all sensors connected to it to be offline for a while. In this paper, an adaptive and fault-tolerant system that continues to function in presence of AP failures and sensor joins (churn) is proposed. As a case study, it is showed how the system can be used to automate a building. The APs have associated software agents that use Paxos protocol to allocate the sensors to APs under churn. Virtual redundancy is implemented via Paxos, thus when an AP fails, its role will be taken by another AP. Hence, it is achieved high reliability by using software agents with wireless sensors, and employing the Paxos protocol, without any component redundancy and with low implementation cost.