Managing the Internet Of Things at Home

IP-based connectivity and IPv6 in particular is being praised as the unified future of the Internet Of Things. While it may be true in general, the devil, as always, is in the details.

My automatic property gate has an IPv6 address. I can control it from any place on Earth. My driveway floodlights have IPv6 addresses too. They too can be controlled from anywhere. Because my controller, which is a smartphone, knows the addresses of both the gate and the floodlights.

But remote control is not cutting edge at all. It is not even an automation, not to mention intelligence. Remote control is manual control. But what if I wanted to add some automation to the setup? Say, when my gate opens and it is dark outside, the floodlights should light up.

Imagine the gate is smart. Meaning it knows the location and can compute the sunrise and sunset times. Let's assume the gate is even smarter: it can compute the "and", activating the lights when it is dark while it is opening. So it just needs to send the "on" signal to the lights.

But how does the gate know the lights? It would need at least the lights' IP address. So how do you tell the gate the IP address of the lights? And how do you assign the lights their IP address in the first place (in IPv6 world it is already taken care of, but most still live in the IPv4 world). And how do you make sure the assigned IP is persistent? And what happens when the lights break down and you install new ones?

Most of these questions remain unanswered without a system controller: a box / service that takes care of address assignments, provisioning of rules, discovery, security (the floodlights should trust the gate and not listen to other untrusted sources).

The Internet of Things in the Cloud has DNS services for address discovery. And root CAs to establish the chains of trust. The Internet of Things at home simply won't happen without similar services. Your gate has no way to learn the lights it should control. It needs to be managed. Assigned addresses, trust relationships and event associations. Then there has to be a state manager (the "it is dark" state should not be computed and kept in the gate, but at some central state manager service). Then there has to be a rules engine: to compute the "and".

The Internet of Things at home needs to be managed. There is no way it can happen and function in an cross-connected and integrated way without a central manager unit running multiple support and execution services.

Houses need computers, central computing and management units. Planes have them already. Cars have them too. Humas have brains. Houses need them too. Otherwise they will be like bodies without brains. Independent, isolated subsystems capable only of simple conditional reflexes.