Home, SafeHome: Smart Home Reliability with Visibility and Atomicity

Abstract: Smart environments (homes, factories, hospitals, buildings) contain an increasing number of IoT devices, making them complex to manage. Today, in smart homes where 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 {\it visibility models} which trade off between responsiveness vs. incongruence of the smart home state. We implemented SafeHome and performed workload-driven experiments. We find that a weak visibility model, called {\it eventual visibility}, is almost as fast as today's status quo (up to 23\% slower) and yet guarantees serially-equivalent end states.