Design and Implementation of a Wireless Sensor Network for Smart Home Applications

In smart homes, devices take partial control of the house and make decisions that increase its safety and functionality for many useful applications. Due to the high cost of cable installation, wireless sensor networks are considered to be a good choice for these systems. In smart homes, the capability to reliably detect events such as intrusions, gas leakages, or accidents, is an essential functionality. A correct control action, such as alarming or shutting gas pipes relies entirely on reliable event detection. Given that reliability is the major concern, detection solutions should be found that make decisions with the smallest possible cost. A way to achieve this is by using appropriate detection and data fusion techniques of measurements from multiple sensors. Furthermore, estimation aided detection in every sensor is essential so as to provide a noiseless environment for the decision concerning the happening of an event in each

node of the network. In this thesis, several distributed detection techniques are reviewed and their suitability for low power sensor networks is investigated. A wireless sensor network is designed and completely implemented in order to test the functionality and the reliability of the methods. In the

presence of a detected event, the sensor network sends a Twitter notication to the user and, meanwhile, actuates a control decision that can solve the detected problem. The experiments show that the studied detection methods are able to offer reliable performance even in the presence of high noises in the measurements. It is concluded that wireless sensor networks can be effectively used in smart home applications, provided that detection methods of adequate complexity and reliability are implemented.