The thesis deals with the design of a general architecture for SH, which is a very challenging task mainly because of the extremely large variety of devices, link layer technologies, and services that may be involved in such a system. The feasibility of the proposed system architecture has been pragmatically investigated with the development of a novel, distributed, fault tolerant, and self-configuring architecture used for monitoring and controlling home environment through heterogeneous ubiquitous sensor nodes based on a widespread local data collection system, named as Local Area Cloud. By means of this architecture, the system is always aware of the environment status and changes in the system itself are handled during runtime, improving flexibility and making the system independent from external applications. Experimental results show that the system can be successfully employed to address functional and non-functional requirements of smart environments. Furthermore, in order to make the whole system an open source project where developers can contribute by sharing their own applications, it has been implemented an application programming interface (API), which it has been designed to abstract the underlying implementation and only exposing objects and/or actions that developer needs to build their specific service-oriented applications, using the proposed architecture as backbone.
