Smart Home Communication Technologies and Applications: Wireless Protocol Assessment for Home Area Network Resources

6. Conclusions 
Smart Home successful implementation on a large scale may help address some of the major 
challenges in the twenty first century, such as improving efficiency gains in energy consumption or 
facilitating the expansion of advanced services for health care in a rapidly aging population worldwide. 
This paper presented a thorough analysis of wireless protocols for HAN, comparing and discussing 
their advantages and downsides. In this study, short range wireless architectures have been considered 
as key for a smart home enabled by wireless HAN. A key element for Smart Home HAN to be a real 
possibility is to integrate a mixture of wired and wireless networks through an M2M gateway.
The analysis has focused on two main families of standards: those built on IEEE PHY/MAC and on 
solutions that do not comply with IEEE standards. Their adequacy as regards major application area 
requirements in smart home solutions was investigated. No single wireless protocol analysed appears 
to satisfy the smart home functional areas’ communication requirements on the whole. For energy 
management in smart homes, most of the low-power and low data protocols are adequate for this kind 
of function (such as MiWi, ZigBee, Wavenis, among others) with the exception of Insteon and 

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Energies
2015
, 
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EnOcean, which do not have enough security services. For medical and surveillance applications,
Wi-Fi is better positioned. Finally, UHD multimedia requirements will still be dependent on a wired 
infrastructure; however, the newer Wi-Fi protocol generations are on the right path to fulfill
these requirements. 
Acknowledgments 
This work was supported by FEDER funds (European Union) through COMPETE and by Portuguese 
funds through FCT, under Projects FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-020282 (PTDC/EEA-EEL/118519/2010) 
and UID/CEC/50021/2013. In addition, the research leading to these results has received funding from 
the EU Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement No. 309048.