Application of Internet of Things (IoT) for home energy management

With technology evolving at a drastic rate, our lives have been integrated with them. Countries have taken a step into a new era of Smart Cities enabling technology to increase the quality of life. This project delves into the study ad understanding of the Internet of Things (IoT) concept and how it plays a part in Singapore's Smart Nation initiative, specifically in a Smart Home. A Smart Home prototype model was build using two Arduino boards and incorporates various sensors such as a lux sensor, a temperature and humidity sensor and a PIR motion sensor. These sensors allow several devices that are connected in the model to function according to external inputs from the environment to decrease the total energy consumption. Coupled with these sensors, are a pair of Xbee modules to transmit a desired power value keyed in via a keypad between the Arduino boards to limit the total energy in of the devices in the model. A simulation model of a Smart Home network was also created using Cooja simulator running on Ubuntu to better facilitate the understanding of the IoT. It portrays four Tmote sensors that is connected to an Area Border Router (ABR) using the RPL protocol. This connection gives an external IPv6 value to the sensor nodes allowing their data to be access through the border router.