In recent years, the home environment has seen a rapid introduction of network enabled digital technology. This technology offers new and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of devices within the home for the purpose of home automation. Moreover, with the rapid expansion of the Internet, there is the added potential for the remote control and monitoring of such network enabled devices. However, the adoption of home automation systems has been slow. This paper identifies the reasons for this slow adoption and evaluates the potential of Zig-Bee for addressing these problems through the design and implementation of flexible home automation architecture. Device control is a process that is done in the day to day life of mankind. Usually there are a number of devices associated with home and an efficient control of these systems is a tedious task. The rapidly advancing mobile communication technology and the decrease in costs make it possible to incorporate mobile technology into home automation systems. © 2011 IEEE.