Lumos: Improving Smart Home IoT Visibility and Interoperability Through Analyzing Mobile Apps

The era of Smart Homes and the Internet of Things (IoT) calsl for integrating diverse "smart" devices, including sensors, actuators, and home appliances. However, enabling interoperation across heterogeneous IoT devices is a challenging task because vendors use their own control and communication protocols. Prior approaches have attempted to solve this problem by asking for vendor support, or even fundamentally re-designing the architecture of IoT devices. These approaches face limitations as they require disruptive changes.This paper explores a new approach to improving IoT interoperability without requiring architectural changes or vendor participation. Focusing on smart-home environments, we propose Lumos that improves interoperability by leveraging Android apps that control IoT devices. Lumos uses this information learned from IoT apps to enable "best-effort" interoperation across heterogeneous devices. Our evaluation with 15 commercial IoT devices from three major IoT platforms and in-depth user studies conducted with 24 participants demonstrate the promising efficacy of Lumos for implementing diverse interoperation scenarios.