An OS for Internet of Everything: Early Experience from A Smart Home Prototype

[Abstract] The proliferation of the Internet of Everything (IoE) has pulled computing to the edge of the network, such as smart homes, autonomous vehicles, robots, and so on. The operating system as the manager of the computing resources, is also facing new challenges. For IoE systems and applications, an innovative operating system is missing to support services, collect data, and manage the things. However, IoE applications are all around us and increasingly becoming a necessity rather than a luxury. Therefore, it is important that the process of configuring and adding devices to the IoE is not a complex one. The ease of installation, operation, and maintenance of devices on the network unarguably plays an important role in the wide spread use of IoE devices in smart homes and everywhere else. In this paper, we propose Sofie, which is a smart operating system for the IoE. We also give the design of Sofie. Sofie can be implemented via different IoT systems, such as Home Assistant, openHAB, and so on. In order to implement Sofie to get some early experience, we leverage Home Assistant to build a prototype for the smart home. Our work shows that Sofie could be helpful for practitioners to better manage their IoE systems.

[Keywords] edge computing; IoE; smart home; operating system