Real-Time Execution of Trigger-Action Connection for Home Internet-of-Things

IFTTT is a programming framework for Applets (i.e., user customized policies with a "trigger-action" syntax), and is the most popular Home Internet-of-Things (H-IoT) platform. The execution of an Applet prompted by a device operation suffers from a long delay, since IFTTT has to periodically reads the states of the device to determine whether the trigger is satisfied, with an interval of up to 5min for professionals and 60min for normal users. Although IFTTT sets up a flexible polling interval based on the past several times an Applet has run, the delay is still around 2min even for frequently executed Applets. This paper proposes a novel trigger notification mechanism "RTX-IFTTT" to implement real-time execution of Applets. The mechanism does not require any changes to the current IFTTT framework or the H-IoT devices, but only requires an H-IoT edge node (e.g., router) to identify the device events (e.g., turning on/off) and notify IFTTT to perform the action of an Applet when an identified event is the trigger of that Applet. The experimental results show that the averaged Applet execution delay for RTX-IFTTT is only about 2sec.