SMS Based Wireless Home Appliance Control System (HACS) for Automating Appliances and Security

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Introduction
The aim of the paper is to investigate a cost effective solution that will provide controlling of
home appliances remotely and will also enable home security against intrusion in the absence of
home owner.
The motivation is to facilitate the users to automate their homes having ubiquitous access. The
system provides availability due to development of a low cost system. The home appliances control
system with an affordable cost was thought to be built that should be mobile providing remote
access to the appliances and allowing home security.
Home security has been a major issue where crime is increasing and everybody wants to take
proper measures to prevent intrusion. In addition there was a need to automate home so that user
can take advantage of the technological advancement in such a way that a person getting off the
office does not get melted with the hot climate.



Related Work
Delgado, Picking, and Grout (2006) consider the problems with the implementation of home
automation systems. Furthermore the possible solutions are devised through various network
technologies. Several issues affecting home automation systems such as lack of robustness, compatibility
issue and acceptability among the old and disabled people are discussed.
Ciubotaru-Petrescu, Chiciudean, Cioarga, and Stanescu (2006) present a design and implementation
of SMS based control for monitoring systems. The paper has three modules involving sensing
unit for monitoring the complex applications. A processing unit that is microcontroller and a
communication module that uses GPRS modem or cell phone via serial port RS-232. The SMS is
used for status reporting such as power failure.
In their paper, Conte and Scaradozzi (2003) view home automation systems as multiple agent
systems (MAS). In the paper home automation system has been proposed that includes home appliances
and devices that are controlled and maintained for home management. The major task is
to improve performance.



Preliminaries
Home Appliance Control System (HACS)
Home appliance control system is based on GSM network technology for transmission of SMS
from sender to receiver. SMS sending and receiving is used for ubiquitous access of appliances
and allowing breach control at home.
The system proposes two sub-systems. Appliance control subsystem enables the user to control
home appliances remotely whereas the security alert subsystem provides the remote security
monitoring. The system is capable enough to instruct user via SMS from a specific cell number to
change the condition of the home appliance according to the user’s needs and requirements. The
second aspect is that of security alert which is achieved in a way that on the detection of intrusion
the system allows automatic generation of SMS thus alerting the user against security risk.



Characteristics of HACS
The proposed system characteristics involve remote controlling of appliances, intrusion detection,
system security and auto-configuration such that system automatically adjusts the system settings
on running hardware support check. The system has useful features such as displaying of battery
level, charging status and signal strength of the mobile thus making system reliable.

Strengths of HACS
HACS system has many advantages such as remote controlling of home appliances, availability
and ease of users. The user can get alerts anywhere through the GSM technology thus making the
system location independent. The system contains low cost components easily available which
cuts down the overall system cost.