Smart Home: Application using HTTP and MQTT as Communication Protocols

This study discloses the development of a solution for realizing a smart home in the post COVID-19 era using the Internet of Things domain knowledge. COVID-19 outbreak has been catastrophic and impacted everyone's lives due to its rapid transmission from one body to another. This study aims to reduce virus transmission by eliminating the need to touch any common-point surface in a home, such as switches, doorknobs, and remotes. We provide a generic solution by coupling things with the internet to control them remotely. The project aims to showcase a working solution to controlling devices like smart bulbs, smart fans, smart ACs, and smart door locks in our self-developed emulator over WWW securely using two different protocols, viz., HTTP and MQTT-over-WSS. Additionally, intent authentication over HTTP is based on digital signature that is demonstrated using RSA (encryption) and MD5 (hashing) when the system is deployed in insecure environment(s). RESTful API deployed on AWS EC2 is used to realize HTTP communication protocol, and MQTT is realized using AWS IoT service. The developed project can be applied to any smart home setting like a hotel or public place using AWS IoT, Lambda, or similar infrastructure as a broker.