AXIOM: A Flexible Platform for the Smart Home

The AXIOM hardware/software platform aims at bringing easy programmability on top of a cluster of processors by using a fast interconnect and FPGA as a basis for building a scalable embedded system. The Smart Home is one of the key scenarios in which AXIOM could be useful for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). In Smart Homes, everything is linked to the flow of information that from the on the field devices needs to arrive to the cloud servers. The information sensed in the environment will not be transmitted as is to the higher layers, but is somehow interpreted to provide a synthetic light-weight representation of the environment. In such a scenario, it is then clear that there is a need for peripheral nodes as well as intermediate gateways which needs to be able to perform high-performance computational loads. AXIOM provides the possibility of designing a cluster of low-power/low-budget boards, which could be packed inside a high-performance embedded low-cost product. The AXIOM boards are heterogeneous, thus allowing for even greater diversity which is needed in those kind of IoT scenarios. The cluster itself can then be integrated inside the IoT architectures as computational-power node, which could be the center of a distributed intelligence near the edges of the IoT network.