## 3 Home Area Network  
### Home Communication General Architecture  
A smart home can function to a certain extent in an interactive and independent way. These additional capabilities can then be used to improve the quality of life within the household in various respects, such as automation of routine tasks, provision of health services, rationalization of energy consumption, improved individual efficiency, and enhanced home security, as well as to revolutionize what we define as entertainment. Since smart home interconnection specifications and communication technologies are relatively new and under development, most available communication protocols were developed prior to the advent of the smart home vision. Consequently, evaluation studies are critical to determine whether these protocols are suitable for smart home communication requirements. Thus, intense research has been devoted to this field [40]. In this context, local networks for small home areas are gaining more presence and relevance as advanced automation and energy management functionalities are added to household devices. Essentially, the HAN-enabled smart home is a fundamental step to enable the exchange of information and interoperability among several smart domestic appliances connected to other devices or networks through many protocols, such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, WiFi, Z-Wave, _etc._ inside or within the close neighbourhood of a house. The modern home local wireless networking approach is based on standards such as Local Area Network (LAN) and Body Area Network (BAN) or Personal Area Network (PAN), which are used to describe a network of a smaller scale ranging from 12 to 100 meters. Commonly, they target local network applications based on low cost wireless technologies [41]. PAN and BAN communication infrastructures are largely employed in domestic applications allowing the user to be on the move, and do not require high expertise to manage the network operation, such as adding or removing components. Although some services like the monitoring of a certain feature related to health issues and performed by smart homes can be included in the BAN range of communication, a wider area of action is required for the whole infrastructure to function. On the other hand, such a network configuration can be sufficient since it is capable of staying fully operational for a long time and its energy is cost effective. PAN can fulfill more requirements since it consists of wearable and portable equipment capable of interacting with the immediate neighbourhood and is able to communicate with the wider environment via larger area wireless backbones. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are alternative cost effective solutions for connecting sensor nodes in highly meshed networks with very low energy requirements [42]. Integrating sensing, communication, and computation capabilities for monitoring and data processing of variables, such as temperature, pressure, humidity, and light, allows complex data processing based on sensed physical phenomena for smart living purposes [43]. Even though such categories of networks cover a broad range of functionalities, this is insufficient. In addition, there is no interoperability feature that could allow communicating with each other. Therefore, a wider network (global wireless infrastructure) is required to congregate different levels of communication that have specific complexities such as timing constraints or critical data traffic of high priority. Figure 1 shows the general framework of the smart home integrating main application areas as identified below, meaning that security, health care, entertainment, energy efficiency, and all related services are connected to a domestic communication infrastructure. Figure 1: Smart home devices accessed through global network framework. Taking into account the different purposes of each of these areas, a global network is needed for an integrated higher structure of communication that comprises several dedicated home networks.