Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 5849: Design and Implementation of Thermal Comfort System based on Tasks Allocation Mechanism in Smart Homes (Sustainability)

The recent trend in the Internet of Things (IoT) is bringing innovations in almost every field of science. IoT is mainly focused on the connectivity of things via the Internet. IoT’s integration tools are developed based on the Do It Yourself (DIY) approach, as the general public lacks technical skills. This paper presents a thermal comfort system based on tasks allocation mechanism in smart homes. This paper designs and implements the tasks allocation mechanism based on virtual objects composition for IoT applications. We provide user-friendly drag and drops panels for the new IoT users to visualize both task composition and device virtualization. This paper also designs tasks generation from microservices, tasks mapping, task scheduling, and tasks allocation for thermal comfort applications in smart home. Microservices are functional units of services in an IoT environment. Physical devices are registered, and their corresponding virtual objects are initialized. Tasks are generated from the microservices and connected with the relevant virtual objects. Afterward, they are scheduled and finally allocated on the physical IoT device. The task composition toolbox is deployed on the cloud for users to access the application remotely. The performance of the proposed architecture is evaluated using both real-time and simulated scenarios. Round trip time (RTT), response time, task dropping and latency are used as the performance metrics. Results indicate that even for worst-case scenarios, values of these metrics are negligible, which makes our architecture significant, better and ideal for task allocation in IoT network.