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 (ie, 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.