We want to develop a home automation application and want to begin with the simplest one. We will have some smart electricity bulbs, which are not just energy efficient but would also be remotely controllable and send status updates.

For having some control on non-smart devices, we have, let's say, developed a smart extension cord which has smart switches where you can plug any accessory, while the smart switch can give us the status as on or off.

We could have another device such as an energy monitor having some energy-consumption-specific sensors, or say, a monitor camera to read the electricity meter and transfer the readings to us periodically so as to measure consumption. For the simplicity of our design, let's skip this device for our sample architecture.

Along with these other devices, say we have a master device which we'll call Home Hub (HH). This device basically captures from and transfers the data to other smart devices over, say, Bluetooth. Our smart devices talk over Bluetooth to transmit their status as on or off (to the least) to the home hub. The HH device is able to configure and connect to the home Wi-Fi, or plug in to your home router. It is this HH device which gathers information from the local smart devices, and transmits information to our server application.

This application basically is as an IoT application, and the gathered data can be applied to perform analytics (both real-time and batch), and provide feedbacks on efficiency back to the home users. Machine learning can also be applied to deduce interesting results. However, for now, we are not looking to apply analytics or intelligence.