In the prior work, a smart home IoT area network emulator was developed that accurately mimics real smart appliance behavior and generates realistic network traffic datasets. However, the emulator remains limited in scalability, scenario diversity, and interoperability with external simulators and real systems. This paper presents an approach to extending the smart home emulator as a large-scale and interoperable component of the Cyreal framework. Cyreal envisions the integration of simulators, emulators, and real systems over large-scale computing infrastructures, supported by middleware that simplifies deployment, management, and experiment control across a large number of physical machines. Moreover, integration with wireless network simulators, as part of the Cyreal framework, enables richer network parameterization and more flexible scenario evaluation. We discuss the overall architectural design, current limitations, and open research challenges, as well as opportunities to foster more integrated scenarios for the CyReal framework.

This paper presents a testbed for the ECHONET Lite Web API (ELWA), a protocol supporting cloud-to-cloud interoperability for IoT systems. The key innovation of the testbed lies in its ability to integrate IoT devices using any protocol or communication pattern through the introduction of an MQTT-based protocol binding and a token-based access management mechanism. This architecture enables a two-sided marketplace model, with the testbed server acting as a mediator between IoT device providers and service developers, realizing the testbed-as-a-service paradigm for the ELWA ecosystem. The proposed system has been implemented and deployed in a real-world environment with a variety of devices. Performance evaluations demonstrate the testbed’s scalability, reliably handling up to 3,000 concurrent requests per second, with minimal overhead introduced by protocol binding and access control mechanisms.

This paper proposes a HEMS controller that enables ECHONET Lite-compliant devices to meet the semantic and interoperability requirements of the recent European Code of Conduct (CoC) on Energy Smart Appliances. By translating ECHONET Lite data into a CoC-compliant model using SAREF ontologies, the controller bridges Japan’s smart home protocol with the European smart grid. This approach aligns with recent trends in CoC integration observed in other protocols, such as Matter and the Home Connectivity Alliance. Compatibility with the Knowledge Engine, used in major EU pilot projects, highlights the solution’s practical viability. This work provides a clear pathway for Japanese manufacturers to align with EU energy regulations and promotes global smart home interoperability.

The ECHONET Lite Web API (ELWA) is a crucial part of the ECHONET 2.0 vision, offering a standardized interface at the IoT platform level for smart homes. This enables service providers to utilize home appliances from multiple vendors to implement intelligent services. However, there are limited options for commercial home appliances that support ELWA. In contrast, Matter is a new protocol that is gaining traction in consumer electronics, with a wide range of affordable products available. However, Matter primarily focuses on standardizing at the device level, leaving the IoT platform open to various ecosystems to develop. In this paper, we introduce our solution that integrates Matter into ELWA, enabling service providers supporting ELWA to work with Matter devices. This integration promotes a win-win scenario for both ELWA, which gains access to more compatible devices to attract service providers, and Matter, which avoids ecosystem lock-in issues at the IoT platform level. The proposed solution has been successfully tested with both commercial and emulated Matter devices using an ELWA server, following the latest ELWA guideline v1.1.6. This work paves the way for implementing intelligent services for smart homes, such as elderly monitoring and disaster prevention, by utilizing low-cost home appliances.

Web of Tactile Things (WoTT) aims toward a standardized platform designed for tactile devices, facilitating the exchange and updating of data across diverse domain web services. However, the requirements for specified devices pose a challenge when deploying on low-profile devices. Furthermore, the concentration of processing the sensing and server operations on a single computer creates a bottleneck that restricts the system's scalability. To enhance the potential applications, this study introduces an extended platform based on WoTT that decentralizes processing. This separation involves distinct processing for the tactile sensor and the WoTT server becomes independent elements. The tactile sensor is integrated with an onboard computer for sensing tasks, enabling wireless transmission of tactile data packets. In this proposed system, each external device can establish wireless connections with the server via the MQTT (Message Queueing Telemetry Transport) message protocol. In order to validate this approach, we construct a comprehensive system incorporating tactile sensors, AR devices, and 2D linear stages. Leveraging a deep neural network (DNN), the tactile sensor's data drives the anticipation of soft skin deformation by capturing visual cues through marker displacement. Tactile data is then encoded and transmitted to end devices using the MQTT protocol, directing the 2D linear stage's interaction with a phantom arm, while AR devices visualize the tactile sensor's soft skin deformation.

The new smart home protocol, Matter, has garnered worldwide attention for its ability to tackle the most significant obstacle to fully unlock the potential of smart homes: interoperability. The increasing support for Matter among numerous vendors in their products is having a noticeable impact on interoperability at the device level. This work expands the reach of Matter to the IoT platform level by integrating it with an open and standardized platform, oneM2M. One of the key strengths of oneM2M is its ability to provide an open, common, and flexible interface at the platform level, facilitating seamless interconnection across various domains. This integration pave the way to provide Matter’s smart homes user with advanced intelligence services, including AI/ML applications, and emerging concepts like the metaverse. The proposed Interworking Proxy Entity (IPE) for Matter has been successfully implemented, and multiple scenarios have been tested using both commercial and experimental Matter devices within the oneM2M ACME and Mobius platforms. The results demonstrate seamless integration of Matter devices into the oneM2M platform, enabling other applications to interact with them solely through oneM2M standard interfaces. Additionally, the IPE proves to be practical for real-world applications with negligible overhead, offering mutual benefits for both Matter and oneM2M ecosystems.

With the increasing number of connected devices in smart homes, ensuring compatibility and interoperability is becoming increasingly more important. Matter and ECHONET Lite have been introduced to tackle this issue. While Matter is gaining significant attention globally as the future protocol for smart homes, ECHONET Lite has a long history of development and adoption in the smart home in Japan. Therefore, it is essential that both Matter and ECHONET Lite devices are interoperable to provide maximum benefits to users.In this paper, we provide an in-depth analysis that compares the architecture and features of Matter and ECHONET Lite, highlighting both their commonalities and differences. On top of that, we introduce a solution to bridge ECHONET Lite devices into the Matter ecosystem, enabling them to collaborate seamlessly with other Matter devices. This bridge solution is developed, implemented, and tested within a real smart home testbed installed with commercial and experimental ECHONET Lite devices. Our results show that the proposed solution effectively enables the smooth integration of ECHONET Lite devices into the Matter ecosystem, making it suitable for everyday use in smart home environments.

This paper aims to highlight the similarities and differences between ECHONET Lite, a matured protocol for smart homes in Japan, and Matter, a novel protocol considered to be the future of smart homes. On top of that, we propose and implement a bridge solution that enables devices supporting the ECHONET Lite protocol to seamlessly integrate as native Matter devices. We have successfully deployed the bridge in an experimental smart home environment, which includes a combination of commercial and experimental ECHONET Lite home appliances. Through extensive testing, we confirmed that the bridge solution facilitated correct operations and achieved seamless integration with minimal overhead between the ECHONET Lite devices and the Matter ecosystem.

ECHONET Lite stands as a leading protocol for smart home appliances in Japan, and the publication of data models plays a critical role in fostering collaboration with other ecosystems, not just for ECHONET Lite but for any protocol or standard. Typically, data models are meticulously crafted by experts through the arduous task of condensing and summarizing extensive specification documents. As an illustration, generating a data model solely for the ECHONET Lite protocol (without incorporating other protocols) can demand thousands of working hours. This paper presents an AI-driven solution aimed at alleviating the burden of laborious, repetitive tasks prone to errors during the creation of data models from ECHONET Lite specifications, automating these processes to save human effort. The proposed solution employs Natural Language Processing techniques to extract key vocabularies from natural language descriptions of the specification, mirroring the approach of experts. Consequently, this solution can generate several data models for the ECHONET Lite protocol in a matter of seconds, all using a standard laptop. The findings indicate that machines are capable of emulating experts in extracting vocabularies, ensuring both syntactic error-free outcomes and consistency in the generated data models. Furthermore, the machine offers rapid, dependable results and enhances the reusability of exported data models across various platforms. The generated data models meet the same requirements as those created by humans. This solution is integrated into an official workflow for generating data models for the ECHONET Lite web API and others.

Toward the implementation of the Tactile Inter-net, sharing tactile information among involving entities is an inevitable but challenging task. In this paper, we report our preliminary attempt at the construction of an ontology model for providing a semantic abstraction for tactile sensing devices. The proposed ontology model is expected to break vertical silos caused by the incompatibility issues across platforms/ecosystems due to vendor/standard lock-in. We built the model with specific reference to vision-based tactile sensing devices, but it could be extended for other devices with different tactile sensing principles. To verify the feasibility of the ontology, a digital twin of a physical tactile device has been created and touch events have been reflected successfully. This model is expected to pave the way toward wider utilization of tactile devices at application levels for enhancing the sense of touch through cyber-physical systems.

In this paper, we propose and implement a mock server that utilizes the latest ECHONET Lite Web API guideline to support the development of applications and services for smart homes in Japan. From the Device Description, this mock server supports a mechanism to generate virtual devices whose property-value pairs are configurable based on developers’ needs. As a result, developers can develop and test their ECHONET Lite Web API implementations without actual devices. More importantly, they can verify their solution’s robustness in extreme cases that are hard to achieve with actual devices. This mock server is the first to support the latest ECHONET Lite Web API guideline fully and its usability has been proven.

Toward the development of the Tactile Internet beyond the 5G era and the recently-introduced Metaverse, a need for standardized platforms to exchange haptics information for human and cyberphysical systems is emerging. This paper introduces our attempt for an open and standardized platform for tactile things, namely Web of Tactile Thing (WoTT). The WoTT extends the W3C Web of Things (WoT) to exchange haptic information from tactile sensing devices to cross-domain services via already proven Web technologies. This paper proposes (i) haptic vocabularies to generate the WoT Thing Description for vision-based tactile sensing devices, as well as (ii) mechanisms to connect, update, and exchange tactile information efficiently. To prove the feasibility of the platform, a proof of concept includes (i) a tactile sensing device to produce tactile information and (ii) a WoT client that consumes proposed vocabularies to create a digital twin of the physical device, have been implemented. The feasibility of the proposed platform has been verified by abilities to reproduce the digital twin and reflect touch events timely and correctly via the WoTT.

Although Z-Wave and ECHONET Lite are both popular networking solutions with overlapping use cases in the domain of smart homes and automation, they are inherently incompatible with each other. With the rising popularity and open standards approach of ECHONET Lite and with the introduction of newer alternatives to Z-Wave such as Thread and Matter, we consider the feasibility of using ECHONET Lite as an interface for Z-Wave devices. We evaluate our proposed solution in terms of response times and compare it to the Z-Ware web API. Both approaches show similar response times and are suitable for use in home automation systems.

The ECHONET Lite (ENL) protocol, a smart home interoperability networking protocol popular in Japan, has entered its second phase with the objective of addressing the problem of integrating with other service platforms in order to bring services from various domains into smart homes. In this paper, we address one such integration case, namely that of ENL and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web of Things (WoT). To achieve this integration, we first chose to represent ENL devices as WoT Things, by generating WoT Thing Descriptions for each device. Then, after considering the most relevant integration patterns, we settled on an ENL Web API proxy implementation. This approach is compatible with future ENL specification releases. We deployed our solution in an experimental smart home equipped with ENL devices and during the W3CWoT September 2021 Plugfest, the participants reported a 100% success rate in interacting with the ENL devices through our proxy solution, with the time delay introduced by our system being negligible.

Providing data models is essential for any protocol or standard to achieve cooperation with other ecosystems. This paper proposes a solution to save human efforts from tedious, repetitive, and easy-to-make mistake tasks when creating data models from the standardized ECHONET device objects. The proposed solution was able to generate data models such as device description for the ECHONET Lite web API, thing description schemes for the ECHONET Lite-Web of things integration, and the SAREF extended ontology for ECHONET Lite. Other data models and open API documents for each data model could be easily generated by simply adding more conversion rules. Generated data models have matched the requirements of human-generated data models. This solution is utilizing in a workflow to create the data model for the ECHONET Lite web API.

Smart home technologies are assisting elderly people to live independently and actively. Recently, the smart home healthcare market advances all over the world due to the increasing demand for connected health monitoring equipment. As a consequence, the interoperability problems of personal health standards/ecosystem and smart home protocols/ standards are rising. In the scope of this paper, a concept that supports the cooperation of the PCHA ecosystem and the ECHONET Lite protocol via a Data Distribution Platform is proposed and implemented.

The late 20th and early twenty-first centuries saw massive urbanizations across the world, leading considerate changes in land-cover/land-use, and posing significant threats to UNESCO recognized heritage. The Complex of Huế Monuments, one of World Heritage Site in the centre of Vietnam, is now facing such challenges. This paper conducts a systematic spatial and temporal analysis for a better insight into the contemporary conflict between preserving the historical landscape and developing the urban areas. The analysis involves: (1) classification of land-cover/land-use between 1995 and 2016 using SPOT data; (2) investigation of the urbanization intensity index; (3) identification of key metrics of landscape, spatial index, and natural hazard indicators to build a risk map of the heritage sites; and (4) a final assessment of the risks, as results of urban expansion, on the Outstanding Universal Values (OUV) of these selected samples. The results show that monuments are under threat as risks increased from 1995 to 2016 with a considerable correlation between urbanization intensity index and the risks to OUV. In particular, the area with high risk to OUV increased from 19.78% in 1995 to 23.74% in 2016, and the increasing percentage for the area with very high risk was from 1.26% to 6.67%, respectively. The study area is an example of many similar worldwide cultural heritages that might be threatened by socio-economic development. The successful implementation of the approach for assessing heritage risk presented in this study can be used for other areas with similar characteristics.

FIWARE is an open-source platform that aims to gather, manage, and provide access to information from different sources to accelerate the development of smart solutions. This paper introduces a concept that integrates the ECHONET Lite protocol, a leading protocol for home appliances in Japan, into the FIWARE ecosystem. It includes mechanisms to (i) convert ECHONET device object to FIWARE smart data model and (ii) expose device resources and services for third-party applications via the FIWARE context broker. The integration of commercial ECHONET Lite lighting devices into FIWARE has been conducted to prove the feasibility of the proposed solution.