Smartlife: A Point of Intelligence for Wireless Sensor Networks in Ubiquitous Environment

As home becomes more technologically advanced nowadays people not only need to protect their homes and families from theft or fire, but from carbon monoxide, excessive heat or low temperatures, flooding as well as monitoring their loved ones while they are away. In this research Project, we present the design case for an intelligent embedded system (Hardware and Software) called "SmartLife". We build a working prototype for SmartLife which is made up of tiny sensors, mobile devices, appliances and personal computers from diverse sources. Considering diversity in smart home environment the architecture must be open and flexible to embrace a variety of entities without any special favor towards particular participants or target domains. SmartLife will be the point of intelligence in the smart home environment (complete pervasive environment) which not only communicates with wireless sensors network (monitor & control) but also provides a secure state of mind to elderly homeowners. The work introduces the basics of uClinux kernel as well as the differences between uClinux and the general purpose operating system Linux. It also introduces FPGA based softcore CPU NIOS-II as an embedded platform for our research project. Our uClinux based architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. We describe the design and implementation of our architecture as well as building SmartLife application within it.