With the increasing adoption of smart home devices, users rely on device automation to control their homes. This automation commonly comes in the form of smart home routines, an abstraction available via major vendors. Yet, questions remain about how a system should best handle conflicts in which different routines access the same devices simultaneously. In particular---among the myriad ways a smart home system could handle conflicts, which of them are currently utilized by existing systems, and which ones result in the highest user satisfaction? We investigate the first question via a survey of existing literature and find a set of conditions, modifications, and system strategies related to handling conflicts. We answer the second question via a scenario-based Mechanical-Turk survey of users interested in owning smart home devices and current smart home device owners (N=197). We find that: (i) there is no context-agnostic strategy that always results in high user satisfaction, and (ii) users' personal values frequently form the basis for shaping their expectations of how routines should execute.
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Home, Safehome: smart home reliability with visibility and atomicity
Smart environments (homes, factories, hospitals, buildings) contain an increasing number of IoT devices, making them complex to manage. Today, in smart homes when users or triggers initiate routines (i.e., a sequence of commands), concurrent routines and device failures can cause incongruent outcomes. We describe SafeHome, a system that provides notions of atomicity and serial equivalence for smart homes. Due to the human-facing nature of smart homes, SafeHome offers a spectrum of visibility models which trade off between responsiveness vs. isolation of the smart home. We implemented SafeHome and performed workload-driven experiments. We find that a weak visibility model, called eventual visibility, is almost as fast as today's status quo (up to 23% slower) and yet guarantees serially-equivalent end states.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908888
- PAR ID:
- 10272150
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- EuroSys '21: Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems
- Volume:
- April
- Issue:
- 2021
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 590 to 605
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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