The Smart Home Lab (SHL) is a key research facility designed, developed and managed by the IoT group. It is a physical space (currently located in 5.26 Abacws) comprised of over 170 networked smart home devices. It has six hotdesk working areas where researchers (staff and students) can conduct various types of research with smart home devices. It comprises a wide range of devices such as smart TV, environmental monitoring kettles, various smart speakers, robotic vacuum cleaners, smart metre bells, door locks and many more. We use OpenHab and Home Assistant to capture semantic data and Wireshark to capture network traffic and related network communications and behaviours. The smart home lab also comprises a video network connected to six different types of smart home and consumer CCTV cameras to a network video recorder that allows connecting video analysis research in relation to the smart home domain. We also have a dedicated data science workstation to support extensive machine learning and deep learning research using smart home data.

The Edge Lab support ‘Edge Computing’ research, enabling us to consider a new class of applications (and underlying computational analysis algorithms) that are ‘latency-sensitive’. The Edge Lab consists of 100 nodes where each node comprises of Raspberry Pi 4 (with 4GB RAM), 32GB SD card, Grove Pi, Arduino Shield for Raspberry Pi, Arduino Base Shield, Temperature / Humidity, Light, Motion, Loudness, Air Quality, Dust, and a Camera. They also have interchangeable communication shields, Wifi, Bluetooth, Xbee socket, Xbee XBee-PRO® ZigBee, and Lora. Each node is installed within a case that allows easier deployment. Edge lab also has 3 Nvidia Jetson Nano and 3 Neural sticks. Further, we have over 200 different types of Grove sensors (3 of each type) that can be plugged into any node. The EPSRC Early Career Equipment fund supports this lab.