Lumos: Improving Smart Home IoT Visibility and Interoperability Through Analyzing Mobile Apps

Abstract

The era of Smart Homes and the Internet of Things(IoT) calls for integrating diverse “smart” devices, includingsensors, actuators, and home appliances. However, enablinginteroperation across heterogeneous IoT devices is a challengingtask because vendors use their own control and communicationprotocols. Prior approaches have attempted to solve this problemby asking for vendor support, or even fundamentally re-designingthe architecture of IoT devices. These approaches face limitationsas they require disruptive changes.This paper explores a new approach to improving IoT in-teroperability without requiring architectural changes or vendorparticipation. Focusing on smart-home environments, we proposeLumos that improves interoperability by leveraging Android appsthat control IoT devices. Lumos uses this information learnedfrom IoT apps to enable “best-effort” interoperation acrossheterogeneous devices. Our evaluation with 15 commercial IoTdevices from three major IoT platforms and in-depth user studiesconducted with 24 participants demonstrate the promising effi-cacy of Lumos for implementing diverse interoperation scenarios.