# Home, SafeHome: Smart Home Reliability with Visibility and Atomicity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.12359 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12359/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [An Architecture for Spatial Networking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.22687/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Smart environments (homes, factories, hospitals, buildings) contain an increasing number of IoT devices, making them complex to manage. Today, in smart homes where users or triggers initiate routines (i.e., a sequence of commands), concurrent routines and device failures can cause incongruent outcomes. We describe SafeHome, a system that provides notions of atomicity and serial equivalence for smart homes. Due to the human-facing nature of smart homes, SafeHome offers a spectrum of it visibility models which trade off between responsiveness vs. incongruence of the smart home state. We implemented SafeHome and performed workload-driven experiments. We find that a weak visibility model, called it eventual visibility, is almost as fast as today's status quo (up to 23% slower) and yet guarantees serially-equivalent end states.