Development of Embedded IoT-Enabled Database Management System for Improved Hotel Room Reservation Accountability

This paper applies IoT and embedded system technologies in enforcing accountability of generated funds from hotel room bookings and reservations. Accountability of funds generated as a result of booked rooms in hotels has become one of the prevailing challenges encountered by hotel owners in recent time. This challenge, which is as a result of compromise of integrity of stored data, is responsible for loss of huge amount of money and data annually in hotel management. In a bid to curb the challenges posed by compromise of integrity of stored data in hotel room bookings and reservations, this work utilized inexpensive and off-the-shelf materials such as Raspberry pi 3B+, Arduino Nano with Atmega 328p microcontroller, ESp8266 Wi-Fi Module, ES-130B keyless door lock, and MPR121 keypad in the development of an improved database system. The system wirelessly communicates with an automated door locking system in order to allocate rooms to customers upon successful booking. Object-Oriented System Analysis and Design technique in combination with Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology were adopted for the modeling and development of the prototype system used in demonstrating the purpose of the research. The prototype system automatically generates door access-codes for customers upon successful room booking as well as keeps track of all booked rooms and associated funds. After analyzing the degree of security of the developed prototype system against already existing hotel front office software (FOS), it was observed that the prototype system has a better performance in terms of data integrity, confidentiality, and authenticity. This obviously indicated that the stored data in the prototype system are better secured in that additional layer of security was added to the system through the application of the embedded IoT framework. Consequently, this resulted to the generation of stored room booking data with significantly reduced tendency of compromise by hotel staff or any other entity. This resulted to increased accountability and improved fraud mitigation