infrared ray and power line based multi-access to home
TRANSCRIPT
Ubiquitous Access to Home Appliance Control System using Infrared Ray and Power Line Communication
Tam Van Nguyen, Dong Gun Lee, Yong Ho Seol, Myung Hwan Yu and Deokjai Choi
Department of Computer Engineering, Chonnam National University 300 Yongbong-dong, Buk-gu, Gwangju, 500-757, Republic of Korea
Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract - Home appliance control system is a legitimate
need of people nowadays. Digital home providers like to install their own network and provide home network enabled appliances. It implies customers need to replace existing appliances with new expensive home network enabled appliance. In this paper, a simple but reliable approach to control home appliances is presented. In this approach, we use infrared ray and power line communication integration in our home appliances control system. This system supports the ubiquitous access control mechanism which enables users to check their appliances’ statuses and control them remotely through their cellular phone or Internet.
Index Terms – Ubiquitous Access, Home Appliance Control
System, Infrared Ray, Power Line Communication
I. INTRODUCTION
The continuous mobility gives people the needs to remotely control their home appliances. Home Appliance Control System (HACS) can monitor and control the home appliances as well as security aspects of the digital home. Digital homes are expected to be a standard for future homes [1]. The rapid development of modern home appliances creates difficult choices for users. Instead of buying the new home appliances, most of them are expensive, such as some Smart Home’s devices of several major electronics appliance manufacturers (LG [2], Samsung [3], and Carrier [4]), people can use existing appliances. There are many hindrances to overcome. We address the following issues. The first one is the difficulty in controlling home appliances because there are many types of home appliances. The second one is the mobility in controlling. Home users want to control their home appliances even they are not at home. They can turn off the lights or turn on the alarm system although they forgot to do before they left their home.
This paper presents our approach in answering the above issues. The interesting thing of home appliances is that most of them are connected to the power line and some of them can be controlled by infrared ray (IR). To solve these given problems, we introduce the home appliance control system based on IR and power line. We also present the ubiquitous access mechanism enable home users to check the appliances status and control them remotely through cellular phone, personal computer with Internet.
The rest of this paper describes the details of our approach. First, the communication adapters for adding infrared ray communication (IRC), power line communication (PLC) to the home appliances and the ubiquitous access mechanism are introduced in section II. We present the implementation and achievement in Section III. Then, we introduce the brief survey of recently related works in section IV. Finally, in Section V, we discuss the conclusions and future work.
II. HOME APPLIANCE CONTROL SYSTEM
In this section, we propose our home appliance control system. First of all, we present the system overview. Then, we introduce the communication adapters for adding IR communication and power line communication to the proposed system.
A. System Overview
Fig.1. Home Appliance Control System
Figure 1 shows the structure of HACS, the entity bridges
the communication media and home appliances. HACS is in the active mode. Home users can control their home appliances through HACS at any time. The communication media are in a wide diversity of options. The user has ubiquitous access to his home. He can control home appliances directly through home computer and he can remotely supervise his appliances outside his home via
Internet or cellular phone, too. HACS will be described more details in the next sub-section.
B. HACS components HACS model is designed to control the appliance using two-way communication. In other words, users can get the status of the appliances, and they can also set new statuses for them as well. Our proposed system can handle home appliances divided into categories, which has a direct connection with power line or can be controlled by IR. In the Figure 1, the infrastructure of HACS is described with three important components: home server, web server and command manager.
Home server, with PLC controller and IRC controller integration, is responsible for controlling home appliances.
1) PLC controller The operation of PLC controller is shown in Figure 2a.
The main module, PL control module, is programmed to send signal data to the microcontroller unit (MCU) of IR transmitter through serial port. The signal data are sent to base modem, and then, base modem will transmit the command to specific PCU (Power line Control Unit). Every PCU encompasses a group of devices, including child modem, MCU and a relay. Child modem has its own unique ID. Every PCU is responsible for one appliance. Then, the corresponding appliance will be controlled at once.
2) IRC controller As seen in Figure 2b, the control procedure using IR takes
the following steps. The IRC controller module sends signal data to MCU of IR transmitter through serial port. The signal data form in an array of integers. These integers illustrate the digital signal (high, low and state changes). The IR transmitter has many IR LED lights, and then the LED lights will transmit the IR signal to home appliance. The appliance, which has the similar code as the signal from IR remote control module, will be operated.
(a) PLC controller
(b) IRC controller
Fig. 2. Remote controller mechanism
Web server provides the ubiquitous access mechanism
which supports two-way communication. This component is
different from normal web server supplying web services. As our approach, the web server is added to open the connection from users to home appliances. Users can connect to home server via web server by cellular phone or Internet. As concrete communication medium, the corresponding protocol is used.
Home server supports graphics user interface for users so that they can control their appliances directly at home. Web access is independent of operating system. Users can connect to web user interface in any platform, such as Windows or Linux, providing that has an Internet browser. HTTP is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems [5]. The user can connect to the web server via HTTP protocol. We can make the web user interface similar to mobile user interface.
Beside access directly at home and via Internet, mobile access is the important access of our system. The important requirement is the Internet-accessible feature of cellular phone. Connecting to cellular phone, WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) technology is the primitive Internet-enabling wireless protocol and a browser framework for small, limited-display-capable devices. WAP allows Internet access to personal devices, such as cellular phones, PDAs and other low-computational-power devices [6]. In our system, the signal from web server to cellular phone uses WML format. Cellular phone sends the WSP request to WAP gateway. This request is encoded to HTTP request as URL and then is sent to web server. Web server responds the WML to client cellular phone through WAP gateway. The web server connects to the home server in order to send commands of users. Home server checks commands periodically in a short interval.
Command manager, communicating with PLC controller and IRC controller, supervises the command sending and receiving processes. This component also logs the status change of home appliances.
III. IMPLEMENTATION AND ACHIEVEMENT
In this section, we present our implementation and achievement. After the scenario introduction, we show the implementation and some achievement results from this.
A. Scenario To illustrate the kind of HACS that we are trying to create, we present the scenario of a casual situation.
“Homeowner can control his home appliances by our proposed system. When he goes out for some reasons, the intruder will break into the house. The camera will detect the scene and the intruder is recorded. After that, the intrusion information will be sent to the homeowner as the beforehand assigned phone number is stored in the database. The homeowner will turn on the alarm devices at home and call the police as well.” B. Implementation To examine the system and evaluate the efficiency of the proposed system, we made applications supporting pervasive
access. We modeled the PLC controller system in the board with conventional home appliances connecting power line, such as neon light, digital panel, and fan. These appliances were connected with a PLC for each (Figure 3a). The PLC controller was described in Section II. The IR transmitter with many LED lights on the surface is hung on the ceiling in order to send IR signal to every appliance in the room (Figure 3b). We also arrange some IR-based appliances around the room, for example, TV, humidifier, projector. The cellular phone we used in our system has been installed WIPI (Wireless Internet Platform for Interoperability), a middleware platform that allows mobile phones, regardless of manufacturer or carrier, to run Internet applications [7].
(a) Board with Power Line based control appliances
(b) IR controller
Fig. 3. List of experiment devices
We use desktop computers to realize home server and
web server. The configuration of those computers is at medium grade because we want to migrate our works to embedded boards with lower configuration in the near future. The home server component runs on Windows OS. We use ZBus protocol [8] to control power line signal. The Web Server component running on Linux OS uses Apache HTTP server which can run on every OS to supply web-based application to users [9]. The RS-232 interface is used to send the signal to IR remote controller.
C. Achievement of HACS Figure 4 shows the user interfaces in cellular phone, PC, and webpage with the capture of the suspected motion corresponding to the given scenario.
(a) Movement of the intruder has been detected
(b) Cellular phone with images of the intruder
(c) Remotely control home appliances via web access Fig. 4. Screenshot of user interface provided to users
The homeowner can interact with the system and vice versa. In this scenario, the owner can control his house’s appliances though his cellular phone or Internet when he is miles away from his home. On the other hand, HACS can notify its owner via cellular phone about the intruder. We made some movements for test purpose. The home server is currently in the security mode; therefore, this motion is detected as the intruder’s. This information is transmitted to homeowner at once and the intruding alarm will sound at the same time. Figure 4a is the user interface of home server on home personal computer that shows the tracking of this motion. Figure 4b shows the mobile interface of HACS’s notification about the intrusion. The user can use his cellular phone to turn on the light to easily recognize the intruder and call the police as well. Moreover, users can access the system by using Internet browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, etc. Web access help a user can control their home appliance when he forgot to bring his cellular phone along. Figure 4c illustrates the web access. In that webpage, the images of intruder were also shown. The user can control home appliances everywhere if he has a computer with Internet accessible.
IV. RELATED WORKS
As mentioned earlier in the beginning of our paper, the
research on home appliance controller is still developing.
There are many approaches from different research groups.
A) X10
X10 [10-11] is a communication standard in PLC. Using
PLC, a new communication wire is unnecessary because the electric power line is the communication medium. There are
many X-10 devices of the socket type and the outlet types.
These devices can connect to conventional appliances like
electric lights, refrigerators, washing machines, and the user
can remotely control any appliance busing the X10 advanced
controller by providing the specific house code and unit code.
However, what the user can do is to turn on or off their
home appliances and the other thing they can do is to check
on-off status only. Therefore, home net works constructed
using X10 devices are not enough to control complex devices.
B) Home Appliance Translator
Similarly to X10, Home Appliance Translator (HAT) [12]
and HAT-Sub enable conventional appliances to connect to
home networks. The user can remotely monitor and control
conventional appliances by using HATs and a HAT-Sub.
Users just control remotely by using email or Web browser;
however, these accesses can not give convenience to users. In
addition, using power line is not enough like X10’s case.
TABLE I
ACCESS FEATURE SUPPORT IN EXISTING AND PROPOSED SYSTEM
Row
No.
System Communication Access
Directly
control at
home
Mobile Internet
1 X10 PLC
2 HAT PLC
3 Kanma et al. Bluetooth
4 Yoon et al. PLC
5 Our proposed
system
PLC, IRC
C) Home appliance control system over other methods
Hiroshi Kanma et al. proposed a home appliance control
system over Bluetooth with a cellular phone, which enable
remote-control [13]. Bluetooth can connect the home
appliances and the cellular phone wirelessly. User’s cellular
phone can be used as the controller terminal.
Nevertheless, Bluetooth is a short range wireless
technology. Therefore, the home appliance control based on
Bluetooth is not effective when users stay outside the house.
Meanwhile, Dal-Hwan Yoon et al. introduced the home
appliance control system based on Mobile and Internet [14].
But they must make the partial circuit for each appliance, such
as the door, the motor, and controlling lock, light and so on.
These works are complex due to its own characteristics of
every appliance.
From Table I, the comparison our proposed system with
relevant works is shown. The proposed system enables home
users to check the appliances status and control them remotely
through graphic user interface of home server and applications
using cellular phone and Internet. In addition, the usage of IR
widens the range of controllable appliances.
V. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
We have presented in this paper our work to answer the issues
at the beginning of this paper.
We proposed the simple but reliable system that can
control home appliances over infrared ray and power line.
This system can be ubiquitously accessed various methods.
We also implemented the proposed home appliances
controller system, and then got promising results. Moreover,
users can construct the system easily. The number of home
appliances which can be controlled is unlimited. Our proposed
system does not only work properly with most of home appliances, and this system also doesn’t affect the current
home’s condition.
As mentioned in the implementation section, our works
were accomplished in desktop computer. In the future, we will
migrate our works to embedded boards because small boards
will be always easily usable. We will develop more functions
and try to make a home automation system with context-
awareness. In the home environment, system can collect
information from sensors. People can make digital home using
their own existing home appliances.
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