28-10-2010, 03:05 PM
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Remote-Controllable and Energy-Saving Room Architecture based on ZigBee Communication
Jinsoo Han, Haeryong Lee, and Kwang-Roh Park
Abstract —
This paper proposes remote-controllable and energy-saving room architecture to reduce standby power consumption and to make the room easily controllable with an IR remote control of a home appliance. To realize the proposed room architecture, we proposed and designed the automatic standby power cut-off outlet and a ZigBee controller with IR code learning functionality. The proposed
power outlet monitors the power consumption for the predetermined time and completely cuts off the power supply when the monitored power is below the threshold. This power outlet has a function of changing the threshold power, which enables any kinds of home appliances to be applied to the power outlet. To efficiently manage the power outlets and the lights, we proposed the ZigBee controller with IR code learning functionality. The ZigBee controller has several onboard buttons to wake up the power outlets and control the dimming light. By using IR code learning functionality, the ZigBee controller can assign a certain IR code of a remote control of a home appliance to the power outlet or the dimming light. A user can control the power outlets and the dimming light with an IR remote control of any home appliance. Our proposed room architecture provides the remote-controllable and energy-saving room1.
Index Terms — ZigBee, Remote Control, IR, Energy-saving,Power Outlet, Standby Power
I. INTRODUCTION
As more and more consumer electronics and home appliances are deployed and the size of them is becoming large, power consumption in home area tends to grow.
Moreover, useless power consumption occurs when they do not perform the primary function or even when they are turned off. This is called standby power. It is known that average 10 % of a total household power is consumed during standby power state [1]. To reduce the standby power of electrical apparatus less than 1 W, International Energy Agency (IEA) proposed ‘1-watt Plan’ [2]. Several researches were conducted
to reduce the standby power in the region of chip, hardware and system [3]-[5]. Although much effort is made to reduce 1 This work was supported in part by the IT R&D program of Ministry of Knowledge Economy/Institute for Information Technology Advancement, Republic of Korea under Grant no. 2007-S-010-02 “Development of Ubiquitous Home Media Service System based on SMMD”. Jinsoo Han is with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: hanjinsoo[at]etri.re.kr). Haeryong Lee is with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: hrlee[at]etri.re.kr). Kwang-Roh Park is with the Electronics and Telecommunications
Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: krpark[at]etri.re.kr). the standby power of consumer devices themselves, efficient power management schemes over a room or home region are greatly required to reduce the total power consumption in home. The controlling and power monitoring capability is indispensable to home power management. The network capability is also required to communicate one another. Several controlling and power monitoring systems have been proposed and implemented [6]-[10]. In these systems, Power Line Communication (PLC), Ethernet, Bluetooth and ZigBee as wired or wireless networks are used to transfer the control
information and the measured power. The signal transformation circuit is designed to measure the working power of the electric outlet [8], [9]. The measured power is recorded and transferred periodically to the remote control unit such as a cell phone, a Personal Computer (PC) and a Personal Digital Assistance (PDA) [6]-[10]. When the measured power is above the maximum load, the power outlet is electrically turned off through the solid state or mechanical relay for safety [9]. The user can also check the power consumption of the home appliances through the remote control unit. However, these previous systems only monitor the consuming power and protect the overload of the power outlet. Efficient power-saving methods are not provided to cut
off useless standby power consumption. A central unit such as a PC or a PDA is required not only to monitor and control the power outlet but also to manage the home automation.In this paper, we propose a remote-controllable and energy-saving room architecture. To realize our proposed room architecture, the automatic standby power cut-off outlet and the ZigBee controller with IR code learning functionality are described and their operation mechanism is explained. In section II, the proposed automatic standby power cut-off outlet and the ZigBee controller are described in detail. In section III, the proposed room architecture is illustrated and the operation mechanism is explained. Section IV shows the implementation results of the power outlet and the ZigBee controller. Finally, in section V, the conclusion is summarized.
