An architectural design based on fog computing and distributed ledger technologies to liberalize smart home appliances by enabling social and coginitive upskilling via their digital twins

Since the beginning of this century, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been paving the way for a variety of smart home applications based mostly on human-to-things interactions and increasingly on things-to-things interactions. Despite the benefits and initiatives brought by such applications, consumers still show hesitation in adopting IoT-enabled home appliances, mainly due to privacy concerns, lack of support for people-centric approach, IoT ecosystems undervaluing the information by restricting its freedom of circulation, cyber security considerations and the technical immaturity of IoT and its coexisting technologies. As people's attitude toward the Internet has taken on a new dimension with the penetration of social media applications, it is also crucial to give a social structure to IoT in order to bring out the true value of IoT for appliance owners. Therefore, equipping Smart Homes with cognitive tasks, that can benefit from things-to-things social collaboration, will enable further business cases which have the potential to bring a breakthrough in customer perception in IoT-enabled consumer electronics. IoT designs has been facing several challenges, such as resource constraints of the edge nodes, scalability, quality of service, mobility, heterogeneity, interoperability, cyber security, privacy, and innovativeness. Moreover, Smart Homes with social and cognitive capabilities will face even more complexity due to extra requirements, such as ease of use, customer satisfaction management, incentive mechanisms, extensive interoperability, and ownership management. Today's IoT applications on consumer electronics seem to bring more value to their manufacturers than they do to their customers, making them more corporate-centric than human-centric. To break the ice between consumers and IoT, business models arising from the integration of social and cognitive capabilities shall be in consumers' favor. To address the aforementioned issues in IoT applications on consumer electronics, the following three strategic enablers are proposed as solution building blocks: Digital twins (DTs), Fog computing and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs). The main contribution of this thesis work is the creation of a reference model that places the DTs of consumer electronics on a Smart Home gateway as the member of fog; assigns absolute ownership of these DTs to the appliance owners; liberalizes their usage on fog systems via DLTs and DLT-enabled clouds; and enables secure and privacy-aware Social and Cognitive IoT applications. Finally, the study has been completed by analyzing the applicability and operation of use case scenarios such as predictive maintenance, selling appliance data, usage optimization, Appliance-as-a-Service, and usage-based or quality-based pricing.