A Smart Home Networking Simulation for Energy Saving
Carleton University, Ontario, Canada. January 2011.

To explore and evaluate the network performance of Demand-Response (DR) programs in smart homes, we designed and implemented a simplified networking simulation model characterized by a Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS) network and a combination of ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 and HomePlug C&C in the Network Simulator Version-2 (NS-2) which supports multiple interfaces/channels. Simulation results show that a combined network generally outperforms a single wireless or wired network. Forwarding RBDS packets to all nodes, AODV and ZigBee routing perform worse than Flooding. Focusing on forwarding packets to individual nodes, for both AODV and ZigBee, a dual-path routing strategy and a backbone-based path routing strategy are superior to a joint-path strategy in terms of packet reception. Under such circumstances, the choice of protocols and routing strategies mainly depends upon various scenarios specific to a smart home as well as the constraints with respect to network energy consumption and the average network latency.