  A Home Area Network (HAN) is considered to be a significant component of
Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and has been studied well in many works.
It binds all the electrical components installed in a defined premise together
for their close monitoring and management. However, HAN has been realized so
far mostly as a centralized system. Therefore, like any other centralized
system, the traditional realization of HAN also suffers from various well-known
problems, such as single-point-of-failure, susceptibility to attacks,
requirement of specialized infrastructure, inflexibility to easy expansion,
etc. To address these issues, in this work, we propose a decentralized design
of HAN. In particular, we propose an IoT based design where instead of a
central controller, the overall system operation is controlled and managed
through decentralized coordination among the the electrical appliances. We
leverage Synchronous-Transmission (ST) based data-sharing protocols in IoT to
accomplish our goal. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed decentralized
framework, we also design a real-time intra-HAN load-management strategy and
implement it in real IoT-devices. Evaluation of the same over emulation
platforms and IoT testbeds show upto 62% reduction of peak load over a wide
variety of load profiles.
