ABSTRACT

Our homes and corporate buildings are becoming increasingly digital environments with the constant accumulation of a growing array of specific as well as generic devices and displays. Consumer and office electronics such as tablets, smart phones, TVs, laptops, printers and scanners, coffee-making machines, toasters, ovens, robots, audio and video systems, and games consoles are ensuring news ways and means through which consumers and knowledge workers compute and communicate, entertain, educate and enable themselves, and so on. Devices are consistently empowered through a host of pioneering technologies, tools, and tips to devise new situation-aware and peoplecentric services to be intimately and intensively relevant for users. e individual as well as collective operation of all kinds of machines, instruments, wares, equipment, electronics, appliances, and so on is another option gaining popularity these days. e remote access of these gizmos and gadgets anytime from anywhere is growing day by day for a variety of purposes. Not only distant connectivity but also empowering devices to sync with one another in the vicinity on an as-needed basis to implement and incorporate path-breaking capabilities and competencies is gaining momentum. Devices are being empowered internally as well as externally to find, bind, and talk with one another with continued success in formulating and firming up versatile technologies for device integration and orchestration. Establishing and embodying policies onto device middleware is another overwhelming proposition to enhance the device power substantially. Cloud connectivity is being mandated, as

most of the device-specific services being developed by inspired developers are deposited in cloud platforms to be readily subscribed to by worldwide users. In addition, cloud infrastructures are being optimized ceaselessly to be deployed in a distributed manner, extremely elastic, managed centrally, accessed publicly, consumed as a service, streamlined through automation solutions, and simplified smartly to position them as the nextgeneration IT infrastructure for all kinds of IT platforms, professional and personal data, applications, and services. In this chapter, we discuss the various technologies and their implications in setting up advanced homes and buildings that in turn contribute to the realization of smarter cities.