Abstract The concept of smart homes has emerged as a transformative approach to modern living, leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) to enable interconnected, intelligent, and energy-efficient environments. A smart home integrates sensors, actuators, and controllers with cloud and edge computing platforms to provide automation, safety, comfort, and energy optimization. Despite technological progress, IoT-based smart home systems face critical challenges, including high setup costs, limited interoperability, network dependency, and cybersecurity threats. This review presents an in-depth analysis of current technologies, architectures, and communication protocols used in smart homes. It also explores artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and renewable energy integration as potential enablers for sustainable and secure home automation. The paper concludes with insights on future research directions for developing affordable, efficient, and privacy-aware smart home systems.
Watpade et al. (Fri,) studied this question.