A zigbee-based home automation system
Summary (4 min read)
Introduction
- Contributed Paper Manuscript received November 8, 2008 0098.
- In recent years the introduction of network enabled devices into the home environment has proceeded at an unprecedented rate.
- Moreover, with the rapid expansion of the Internet, there is the potential for the remote control and monitoring of such network enabled devices.
- The new and exciting opportunities to increase the connectivity of devices within the home for the purpose of home automation remain largely unexploited.
A. Existing Home Automation Technologies
- There are many definitions of home automation available in the literature.
- Due to the fiscal expense of Bluetooth technology, a single module is shared amongst several devices.
- The disadvantages of this system are threefold: users are not provided with a graphical user interface, users have to remember an access code, and they have to remember which buttons to press for the control of connected devices. [5] proposed a novel control network, using hand gestures.
- Interoperability and remote access to home automation systems through the development of home gateways. [6] defined a home gateway as the point of ingress between a personal area network and a public access network.
- Moreover, the existing research has focused on the provision of remote connectivity and has largely neglected investigating the integration of existing local networks.
B. Analysis of the Existing Systems
- The adoption of home automation technology by consumers has been limited.
- Hence, these systems require intrusive and expensive installations.
- Thirdly, lack of network interoperability: both home networks and the home automation systems which utilise them have been developed and adopted in an unplanned and ad-hoc manner.
- This is normally limited to a single method of control, which offers users limited flexibility.
- The existing approaches have not focused on security and safety problems that may arise from their implementation, also known as Finally, security and safety.
II. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
- This section describes the conceptual design of a flexible and low cost home automation infrastructure .
- Authorized licensed use limited to: LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY.
- A home gateway is implemented to provide interoperability between the heterogeneous Zigbee and Wi-Fi networks, and facilitate local and remote control and monitoring over the home’s devices.
- The remote user’s communications traverse the internet until they reach the home network.
- These communications are checked and processed by the home gateway and virtual home, as discussed in greater detail later.
A. Residential Networks
- As discussed, the proposed system architecture implements a ZigBee based home automation network and a Wi-Fi based multimedia network.
- Figure 2 depicts the general architecture of a Zigbee based home automation network.
- The use of Wi-Fi offers several advantages over alternative technologies.
- The problem of interference between these networks increases as more and more standards emerge which use the same communication mediums.
- The interference problems between the possible standards have been investigated. [10] researched the coexistence of Zigbee, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
B. Home Gateway
- The home gateway, as depicted in Figure 1, is charged with providing interoperability between different connecting networks.
- Secondly, the home gateway provides a standardised user interface for devices connecting to the ZigBee home network, remotely using the Internet or locally using the Wi-Fi network.
- The home gateway is implemented in the system architecture to overcome the problem of insufficient network interoperability, identified in existing home automation approaches.
- Furthermore, the interface of the controlling devices is standardised across the control modes.
- The primary objective of the virtual home is to prevent any event that may pose a security or safety concern from implementation in the home networks.
D. Device Engine
- Each device incorporates a dedicated engine, responsible for providing the necessary application functionality and ZigBee network connectivity.
- Moreover, each device engine may contain dedicated security and safety measures.
- Critical devices should check all requested operations to ensure that they will not result in an undesirable outcome.
- Furthermore, collaboration with the virtual home should provide the necessary information to facilitate secure communications.
III. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION
- As depicted, a ZigBee based home automation system is implemented for the monitoring and control of household devices.
- A home gateway has been developed to provide interoperability between these networks.
- The security and safety of the home automation network is realised through the development of the earlier described virtual home on the Home Gateway.
- To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed Authorized licensed use limited to: LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY.
- This section provides a thorough discussion of the system implementation.
A. ZigBee Home Automation Network
- The ZigBee home automation network consists of a coordinator, routers and several end devices.
- This scan time is relatively small and as the home coordinator is initialised infrequently this is an acceptable delay when contrasted with the performance increase possible through the use of a channel with less interference.
- After the coordinator’s initialisation phase the coordinator enters “coordinator mode”, during this phase it awaits requests from ZigBee devices to join the network.
- As the devices are started, during their respective initialisation stage, the node scans for available channels to identify the network it wishes to join.
- A partially connected mesh topology was adopted for the ZigBee home automation network.
B. Wi-Fi Network
- The homes Wi-Fi network was implemented through a standard Wireless (802.11b and 802.11g) ADSL Modem Router, with a 4 port switch.
- Firstly, the modem provides the connection between the Internet and local Wi-Fi network; hence extending access to the Wi-Fi enabled home gateway to any location with Internet access.
- This provides a low cost communication method with the home network, reduced infrastructure costs where Wi-Fi devices are already in use.
- Moreover, home owners can monitor and control the home automation network, using familiar technology and devices.
E. User Interface Devices
- To evaluate the effectiveness of the system architecture for the provision of easy to implement, and flexible modes of control; three control modes were developed.
- A low cost, simple-to-use remote controller, for the local monitoring and control of devices was developed, also known as ZigBee Remote Control.
- Instructions from the remote control traverse the home network until received by the destination device.
- When a Wi-Fi connection was not available the mobile established an Internet connection to access and control the system.
- In both scenarios the instructions sent from the mobile phone are received by the home gateway, which Authorized licensed use limited to: LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY.
F. Home Automation Devices
- To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system three devices; a light switch, radiator valve, and safety sensor, were developed.
- A conventional light switch was integrated with a ZigBee microcontroller, as shown in Figure 6 (a), also known as Light Switch.
- A prototype automatic radiator valve was developed and integrated with a ZigBee microcontroller, as shown in Figure 6 (b), also known as Radiator Valve.
- The safety sensor has special characteristics of interest.
- This reduces the time the device can operate in sleep mode, hence considerably reducing the battery life.
G. System Configuration
- This section has described in detail the individual elements that combine to implement the proposed system architecture.
- A user can login to monitor and control the home automation systems end devices, using one of three user interface devices (ZigBee remote control, Wi-Fi remote control, and Remote access device).
- The messages are forwarded to the home gateway’s IP address on the local Wi-Fi network, through a Wi-Fi enabled ADSL modem.
- Once the home gateway has received the messages they are forwarded to the virtual home.
- Messages from the ZigBee controller are sent directly to the end devices, over the ZigBee network.
IV. EVALUATION
- The implemented system was evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively.
- To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system, four devices, a light switch, radiator valve, safety sensor and ZigBee remote control have been developed and integrated with the home automation system.
- Taking this into account the access delay for the light bulb (1337 ms) can be adjusted by removing the 670 ms access delay attributed to the switch actuation to provide a more realistic access time for the Wi-Fi controller for the light switch of 667 ms.
- This configuration allowed test software running on the local controller to print out the desired temperature set by the user, current temperature around the radiator and time taken to reach the desired temperature by the automatic radiator valve.
- From the comments made the majority of participants felt that the proposed system’s ability to remotely diagnose and check potential errors with systems such as communal lighting was an attractive feature.
V. CONCLUSION
- This paper has reviewed the existing state of home automation systems, and identified and discussed five areas that have hindered consumer adoption of such technologies.
- A novel architecture for a home automation system is proposed and implemented, using the relatively new communication technology ZigBee.
- The inclusion of a Authorized licensed use limited to: LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY.
- Home gateway helps overcome the problems of network interoperability.
- The feasibility and appropriateness of the proposed architecture and technologies in the creation of a low cost, flexible and secure system has been successfully evaluated both through experimentation and user trials.
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Citations
277 citations
Cites methods from "A zigbee-based home automation syst..."
...used for wireless home automation networks [8], [9], and commercial application development [10]....
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...4, IEEE139410, HomePlug, Wi-Fi, and others [103]–[106]....
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...measurement [21]; however, other protocol solutions are not excluded....
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Cites background from "A zigbee-based home automation syst..."
...this paper is quite different from that of conventional WSNbased smart homes [3]–[5], [8], [9], [11] in which the control commands for home appliances are transferred using WSNs....
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References
566 citations
"A zigbee-based home automation syst..." refers background in this paper
...[5] proposed a novel control network, using hand gestures....
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339 citations
"A zigbee-based home automation syst..." refers methods in this paper
...[3] introduced a Bluetooth based home automation system, consisting of a primary controller and a number of Bluetooth sub-controllers....
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246 citations
Additional excerpts
...[2] developed a Java based home automation system....
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141 citations
"A zigbee-based home automation syst..." refers background in this paper
...[6] defined a home gateway as the point of ingress between a personal area network and a public access network....
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125 citations
"A zigbee-based home automation syst..." refers background in this paper
...[4] introduced a phone based remote controller for home and office automation....
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Frequently Asked Questions (11)
Q2. What future works have the authors mentioned in the paper "A zigbee-based home automation system" ?
Moreover the home gateway offers the potential to be easily extended to include interoperability for other communication standards. The potential for successful co-existence and interoperability of Wi-Fi and ZigBee has been practically proven with implementation with a real home automation system.
Q3. What is the dominant protocol in use today?
The dominant protocol in use today is IEEE 802.11g, which operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band and provides a maximum raw data rate of 54 Mbps.
Q4. What is the purpose of the home gateway?
the home gateway reduces the inflexibility in the control modes of existing home automation systems; this is undertaken through the prevision of manual, local and remote control.
Q5. Why is the mesh topology used for the ZigBee home automation network?
Due to the nature of the home environment where communication interference is constantly fluctuating, the advantage of increased communication routes available through the adoption of a mesh topology outweighs the added routing complexity.
Q6. What are the three devices used to test the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system?
To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed system three devices; a light switch, radiator valve, and safety sensor, were developed.
Q7. How long did the access delay for the radiator valve take to be measured?
the ZigBee controller had an average access delay of 670 ms while controlling the light switch, whereas the access delay incurred for controlling the radiator valve was small and subsequently could not be measured with their recording instruments.
Q8. What are the disadvantages of this system?
The disadvantages of this system are threefold: users are not provided with a graphical user interface, users have to remember an access code, and they have to remember which buttons to press for the control of connected devices. [5] proposed a novel control network, using hand gestures.
Q9. Who were chosen to represent the views of the end customers?
The focus group consisted of ten members from a UK Housing Association (HA) who were chosen to reflect the views of the end customers.
Q10. What is the role of the virtual home?
The virtual home, as depicted in Figure 1, is responsible for the administration of security and safety for the home automation system.
Q11. What is the problem of interference between these networks?
The problem of interference between these networks increases as more and more standards emerge which use the same communication mediums.