Smart Home: energy monitoring and exploitation of network virtualization

The Smart Home concept refers to a domestic network environment able to provide connectivity, adaptivity and automation through different kinds of smart device to improve inhabitants’ awareness, safety and comfort. This thesis is concerned with the evolution of the Smart Home Environment towards a new virtual version by mainly dealing with two topics. First, on the application perspective, focus is made on the crucial issue of improving user awareness on power consumptions for achieving energy savings. Second, on the technological infrastructure perspective, it investigates possible impact and related issues of the adoption of network virtualization and programmability technologies in the Smart Home networking by providing a contribution as regards VNF Placement problem. The rational use of energy has recently become one of the most pressing research topic because of the constantly growing consumptions in contrast with the scarcity of resources. In a Smart Home scenario the recent progress of technology, along with lower costs, has made it possible to perform energy monitoring and management actions through the distribution of smart meters and environmental sensors capable of providing information to a Home Energy Management System (HEMS). Recent studies have shown that informing users about the actual appliances consumption as well as device-usage habits, can help to obtain energy consumption reduction in private households. In order to achieve this goal a supervised classification algorithm for detecting and identifying consuming appliances has been implemented. Then a Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) approach has been investigated to reduce the cost of attaching a single meter (i.e. smart plug) to each device; the proposed algorithm aims at recognizing the power consumption of a specific device from the whole-house consumption profile and from the input of context information (i.e. the user presence in the house and the hourly utilization of appliances). As regards the technological perspective, the Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology, together with the complementary Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, let envisage a revolution in the traditional concept of network service delivery and availability. This evolution promises to enable on-demand and flexible services provision as it allows to separate the network functions from the hardware they run on by leveraging the virtualization abstraction. This work addresses the issue of optimal VNF placement in a multi-stakeholder network infrastructure by considering the framework of a NFV Management and Orchestration architecture that leverages the Software Defined Networking paradigm. Given a set of service requests and considering a set of constraints (e.g., maximum end-to-end delay, monetary cost, allowed server utilization level), a mathematical model has been formulated to maximize the profit that can be obtained by both tenants (i.e. Infrastructure providers, Cloud providers) and renters (i.e. service providers/users). In order to favour generalization and to ease the treatment of aspects that in literature have not accounted (e.g. multiple users), the choice of the actual forwarding path of incoming traffic flows is deferred to a later step (optimal routing), to be performed by the SDN Controller. Moreover, the work provides a detailed formalization of service requests and Data Centers and considers two types of users with different privileges (i.e. Premium and Best Effort). The energy efficiency and sustainability goals have been also taken into account.