ECHO-LOCAL: Edge Context Orchestration for Privacy-Preserving Smart-Home Automation

ECHO-LOCAL introduces a privacy-preserving edge architecture that moves the entire smart-home presence estimation and actuation control loop onto a commodity OpenWrt router. By compressing a POMDP presence-control problem into a 5-state FSM estimator paired with a 100-byte 5×5 tabular Q-learning policy, it eliminates cloud round-trip dependencies and metadata leakage. The system achieves a fast 2.2 ms control loop and a compact 697 KB resident set size on live router hardware while enforcing zero WAN telemetry at the kernel level using nftables drop rules.