Abstract

One of the key applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) is smart home automation that allows enhancing comfort, safety, and energy savings in a residential environment. Most of the current solutions put high reliance on cloud infrastructures, which makes such solutions vulnerable to latency, privacy issues, and extra operational costs. In this paper, we present a cheap edge-based smart home automation system using a low-cost Raspberry Pi and ESP32 microcontroller that communicates over local Wi-Fi. This will allow the proposed system to ensure that all relay modules controlling household appliances can operate correctly in real time while consuming very little power and switching accurately. Its experimental evaluation yielded an average response time of 0.43 seconds and 35–60% lower latency than state-of-the-art cloud-based systems, stable communication, and a relay switch accuracy of 100% in each test cycle. The experimental results show that the proposed architecture has lower latency and cost and is more scalable as compared to existing solutions. The system is suitable for large-scale beamforming-based smart home implementation and flexible for further deployment in the smart home domain.

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