Towards Achieving a Balance between the User Satisfaction and the Power Conservation in the Internet of Things

In the recent era of digital revolution, life has become simple and more comfortable than it was before. Today, we are witnessing a revolution in the information technology domain where the Internet of Things is employed in various aspects of our life. The impact of this revolution is clearly seen in our homes where appliances are controlled and managed via voice commands, inspiration, hand signals, or by a command that results from analyzing the human behavior. Power conservation is one of the significant issues in smart homes and smart cities where buildings consume about 40% of the total energy. Another crucial issue is the user satisfaction. Achieving a balance between power conservation and the user satisfaction is a challenge. In this article, our contributions are: 1) a survey that sheds light on various techniques (the state of the art) used for reducing the power consumption based on monitoring the occupant’s behavior; 2) a comparison between these techniques based on various factors elicited from the literature review; and 3) this study reveals the following gaps in the previous work: a) lack of integrity between the IoT systems; b) lack of auto measuring of the user satisfaction; and c) lack of achieving a balance between the user satisfaction and the power saving. As an attempt to close the above gaps, this article proposes a smart and integrated IoT framework for automeasuring of the user satisfaction and thus, achieves a balance between the power conservation and the user satisfaction. Besides, it suggests future research directions for researchers.