2012 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics

October 14-17, 2012, COEX, Seoul, Korea

A Cloud Network-based Power Management

Technology for Smart Home Systems
Lih-Jen Kau , member IEEE, Bi-Ling Dai, Chih-Shen Chen, and Sung-Hung Chen
Department of Electronic Engineering & Graduate Inst. of Computer and Communication Engr.
National Taipei University of Technology
No.1, Sec. 3, Chung-Hsiao E. Rd.
Taipei 10608, Taiwan, R.O.C.
ljkau@ntut.edu.tw
AbstractWith the fast development of network infrastructure, connecting to the Internet at any time and any place has
been made easy and possible. On the other hand, as our world
is suffering energy crisis on oil and natural resources shortages,
how to make efcient use of limited power energy has remained
a major problem to be conquered so far. Aimed to facilitate
the life of human being as well as to use the limited power
energy more efciently, we propose in this paper a technology
that can perform remote control and monitoring of electrical
appliances on the Internet. To do this, an intelligent power socket
(IPS) module that is able to control and monitoring the power
of electricity is realized in this research. The IPS modules are
placed in conjunction with the electrical appliances that are to be
controlled from a far-end place. In addition, an embedded systembased home gateway that can be connected with the Internet is
set up in which the electrical appliances are located. Moreover,
the acquired power consumption information or the status of the
appliances is stored in a database server in the Cloud. With the
proposed structure, authorized users or system managers can
log into the web server which is connected with the database,
monitoring the power status and take actions on the appliances
remotely. The control command from the far-end place, i.e., from
the web server on the Internet, is rst sent to the home gateway
and then transmitted to the IPS modules through the Zigbee
wireless communication protocol so that the remote control of
appliances can be achieved. The proposed architecture can be
easily applied to any kind of room space. Moreover, only a
browser is needed for the client to communicate with the web
server, no other application program is required. As the browser
is now available almost on every information technology products,
e.g., a notebook or a smart phone, the proposed architecture has
been shown to be very convenient and useful for remote control
and monitoring of electrical appliances, and hence can facilitate
the life of human beings.
Index TermsCloud computing, Power management, Remote
control, Database, Client/Server Architecture, Embedded systems

I. I NTRODUCTION
Our world is now suffering energy crisis on oil and natural
resources shortages. Whats worse is that most of the scientic
industries all over the world rely heavily on these resources,
especially the power energy. The high demands on power
energy do have a great impact on the economy of the world.
From the catastrophe of Japanese Tsunami in March 2011, we
are aware of the risks of nuclear power. Therefore, we realize
that the termination of nuclear power delivery is just a matter
of time. However, nuclear power cannot be replaced by Green

978-1-4673-1714-6/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

power in the near future yet. Therefore, while discovering a

substitution for nuclear power, we can now embark on energy
saving.
Considering our living environment, almost every place,
e.g., ofce, school, and dwelling house, are all equipped
with computers, air conditioners, lights and other high-powerconsumption devices. People usually forgot turning off the
power devices after they are not in use. Therefore, how to
make efcient use of the limited energy resources so that
wasting of power energy can be avoided has become a major
problem to be conquered. Recently, the idea of central power
management system is proposed. However most of the central
power management system just perform on and off operation
on the power switch in a room space, control on every single or
individual appliance is hard to attained. In [1], a client/serverbased architecture in conjunction with bluetooth signal for
the remote control of home appliances is proposed. They
also propose the use of a Hall current transducer for the
monitoring of the status of electrical appliances. However, only
on and off control can be attained, and a specic application
program should be installed on both the client host and the
server so that the control command can be transmitted via
the Internet [1]. A smart home energy management system
(SHEM) based on personal area networks is proposed in [2][3].
The SHEM system, which provided with the context-aware
ability and applies the use of Zigbee signal for indoor wireless
transmission of commands, is a well designed architecture
for smart home systems. However, the SHEM system cannot
be controlled remotely, and the power measurement ability
is also not implemented [2][3]. To monitoring the power
consumption, some of the researches propose measuring the
power consumption in digital manners [4][5] or reading the
power consumption remotely [6] so that the human resources
of the power company originally arranged for recording the
power meter of individual customer can be saved. On the other
hand, the user can also know the status of individual electrical
appliance remotely.
Aimed to facilitate the life of human being as well as to
use the limited power energy more efciently, we propose
in this paper a technology that can perform remote control
and monitoring of electrical appliances on the Internet. To do
this, a module that is able to control the power of electricity

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is realized. We call this module an intelligent power socket

(IPS) in the proposed system. The IPS modules are placed
in conjunction with the electrical appliances that are to be
controlled from a far-end place on the Internet. To do this, an
embedded system-based home gateway that can be connected
with the Internet is set up in which the electrical appliances
are located. Besides, we also set up a web server and a
database server in the cloud. The database server is used
to record the status and power consumption of individual
appliances. With the proposed architecture, authorized users
or the system manager can log into the web server which is
connected with the database, monitoring the status and take
actions on the home appliances remotely. The user command
from the far-end place, i.e., from the web server in the cloud,
is rst sent to the home gateway and then transmitted to
the IPS modules through Zigbee wireless communication so
that the remote control of the appliances can be achieved.
The proposed architecture can be easily applied to any kind
of room space. Moreover, no application program should be
installed in the proposed architecture, only a browser for the
client is needed. As the browser is now available almost in
any devices, e.g., a notebook or a smart phone. The proposed
system architecture is hence very friendly and convenient to
users that also facilitates the life of mankind.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section
II gives an overview on the proposed cloud network-based
power management system. The detailed remote power control
and measurement technologies are then introduced in section
III. The layout of the database and dened communication
protocols are addressed in section IV. The designed intelligent
power socket (IPS) module and experiments are given in
section V. Finally, a conclusion is given in section VI.
II. OVERVIEW OF THE P ROPOSED S YSTEM
In this section, we give an overview on the proposed system
architecture. As can be seen in Fig. 1, the proposed architecture
is mainly composed of three blocks, the client, the cloud web
server and database server, and the room space in which the
electrical appliances are located.
Any devices equipped with a browser can be used as the
client device. The database server here is used to record the status or power consumption of individual electrical appliances.
Here, we use MySQL, a powerful and free software, as our
database server. To bridge the user, i.e., the browser, and the
database server, a web server is required. We apply Apache,
a widely used, free, and stable software, as our web server.
The client can now communicate with the web server through
HTTP protocol, an application layer protocol which is based
on TCP/IP protocol in the Internet hierarchy, monitoring the
status and take actions on individual appliance.
The control commands from the server in the Cloud are rst
sent to the home gateway through TCP/IP protocol and then
transmitted to the appliance with Zigbee wireless communication. The home gateway is a server which is used to receive
the user command from the far-end place on the Internet,
and to transmit the status as well as the power consumption

(a)

(b)

Fig. 2. (a) The Cortex-M3-based RDK-S2e module. (b) The CC2530 Zigbee
transceiver.

information of appliances back to the database server. To

make the gateway compact, the RDK-S2e, a Cortex-M3-based
module developed by Texas Instruments incorporation (TI), is
chosen for this purpose (as shown in Fig. 2.(a)). Moreover,
the RDK-S2e module which transforms between UART and
TCP/IP protocol is very useful for industrial applications
for its compact dimension and robustness. The gateway will
then transmit the received commands to a Zigbee transceiver
through the universal asynchronous transmitter and receiver
(UART) interface.
The Zigbee protocol, which is based on the standard of
IEEE 802.15.4, has been widely applied in a variety of
elds for its characteristics of low-power consumption and
supporting variable topologies [2]-[13]. With these advantages,
the Zigbee is also selected for the short distance transmission
of signals in the proposed architecture. We choose in this
research the chip CC2530, a chip also developed by TI, as
the Zigbee transceiver (as shown in Fig. 2.(b)). The command
is then sent to another Zigbee receiver which is connected to
the appliance to be controlled in a wireless manner.
To summarize, the architecture of remote control process
can be best observed through Fig. 3, an architecture for smart
home systems. As can be seen in Fig. 3, the appliances are
all integrated with the proposed IPS module so that the power
of individual appliances can be controlled remotely. The IPS
is also equipped with a Zigbee transceiver, which is used to
accept the command from the far-end as well as to transmit
the status of the appliance back to the server in the cloud.
III. P OWER C ONTROL AND M EASUREMENT
The mechanism for power control and measurement will be
addressed in this section. We rst give a short introduction on
the basis of proposed power control mechanism. After that, the
IR remote control circuit as well as the power measurement
mechanism will be introduced.
A. The Power Control Unit
The basis of the power control mechanism is the zerocrossing detection circuit, which is shown in Fig. 4. Point
A in Fig. 4 is a fully rectied waveform, where point B is
just an attenuated signal of A. After the inverter in Fig. 4,
the zero-crossing signals can be detected at point C, and the
zero-crossing signals can then be used for the control of power
electricity. In the proposed architecture, the point D is used to
control the duty cycle between on and off state of the solid

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Fig. 1.

Proposed cloud-based remote power control and monitoring system.

TRANSFORMER
T1

D1

AC12V
8

4 -

+ 2

R1

A
D2

10uF/35V

R2

+5V
+

C2

10uF/35V

LM7805/TO

Web Server &

Database Server

U2

2
VCC

C Intr

Control Pin

2
U6

Client

AC 110V

Web-based Control
and Surveillance

state relay (SSR), which is indeed a pulse width modulation

system. The circuit in Fig. 4 constitutes the main portion of
the IPS module.
B. The IR Remote Control Unit
It is noted that some of the appliances, e.g., the air conditioner, TV, etc, can not be controlled by varying the power
directly. For this, we design an IR transmission circuit as in
Fig. 5 that just acts what an IR remoter performs. The circuit
inside the dashed block in Fig. 5 is the sub-carrier generation
circuit (usually 38KHz) as well as the IR transmitter. As can
be seen in Fig. 5, the transmission of IR signal is controlled
by the CC2530 module.

AC2

1
2

AC Plug

Fig. 4.

Proposed smart home systems.

AC1

Power Socket

U5

CC2530

Fig. 3.

Power Control &

Measurement

Power Control &

Measurement

ZigBeewireless
transmission

U4

Solid State Relay

R3

RDK-S2e

V-

V+

CC2530

VOUT

VIN

Internet

UART

U1

Home Gateway

C1

GND

AC110V IN

Proposed power control mechanism.

C. The Power Measurement Unit

The block diagram of the power measurement circuit as
well as the detailed schematic diagram between the power
measurement module and the CC2530 Zigbee transmission
module are shown in Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 respectively. As can
be seen in Fig. 6 and Fig. 7, a small resistor is used in series
with the load to measure the current ow of the electrical
appliance. The sensed current and voltage signal are then
amplied and processed through the chip ADE7753, a singlephase multifunction metering IC. Besides, the instantaneous
current, voltage signal, the instantaneous power consumption,
active power, reactive power as well as the power factor
information (in Fig. 8) can all be calculated and kept in the
registers of ADE7753. We can then read all the values out by
connecting the serial SPI interface between the ADE7753 and
the CC2530 controller as in Fig. 6 and Fig. 7. The CC2530

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Internet
P0.5/MOSI

LOAD

VCC

P0.4/MISO
P0.3/CLOCK

R3

P0.2/CS
SHUNT

R2

TCP/IP

R6

C1

R4
2

CC2530

D1

IR Diode

Home Gateway
UART
RDK-S2e

Control

CC2530

Sub carrier

R5

C
E

Q1

R1

IR Transmission Module

Fig. 5.

IR transmission circuits.

Fig. 7. Schematic diagram of the power measurement module and connection

with Zigbee transmission module.

ADE7753
Current

Zigbeewireless
transmission

ADC
Energy
Measurment

Voltage

SPI

MCU
CC2530

ADC

AC 110/220V
Programmable Gain Amplifier

Fig. 6.

The block diagram of power measurement module.

controller can calculate the power energy used by summing up

the acquired instantaneous power consumption. These power
energy information will be transmitted to the home gateway via
the wireless Zigbee signal, and then sent back to the database
in the cloud (Fig. 3).
IV. DATABASE L AYOUT AND C OMMUNICATION
P ROTOCOLS
In this section, the layout of the database server as well as
the command format, i.e., the communication protocol, are to
be introduced. We rst introduce the layout of the database,
and then the communication protocol will be given.
A. Database Layout
In the proposed architecture, we use MySQL, a very popular
and free database software, as our database server. In the
database, we have a main table that records the authorized
users and their password. Every registered user has an individual table that records the status of every electrical appliances.
The basic layout of the database server can be observed in
Fig. 9, which is the main page of PHPMyAdmin, a web-based
interface that can manipulate the database server in a graphical
manner.
After connected and logged into the database server, the
authorized user will see the status of each electrical appliances
as in Fig. 10.(a). The user can then change to the command
mode as in Fig. 10.(b), which is actually a FORM component
in HTML document for interactive page design. The user can
then select the command or adjust the power of selected appliance. After selecting the button Next, the control command will

Fig. 8.

The measurement of power factor.

be sent out to the home gateway through the TCP/IP protocol

on the Internet.
The dynamic page on the web server is realized by using
the PHP language, a kind of script language embedded in the
HTML document. We thus transfer the control commands to
the home gateway by using the PHP socket after the user has
pressed the command button. The web server now acts just
like a client for the connection is initiated by the PHP socket.
The TCP/IP connection ow is shown in Fig. 11. The function
socket write() in Fig. 11 is to transmit the command to the
home gateway, while the function socket read() is to read the
status as well as the power consumption information of the
appliance. The read procedure is necessary because we have
to make sure that the commands or actions have been carried
out on the appliances to be controlled.

Fig. 9. The main page of PHPMyAdmin showing the layout of the database
server.

2530

Command
format for
wired devices

First Byte Second Byte Third Byte Fourth Byte Fifth Byte
Leader
0X39

Fig. 12.

(a)

(b)

Command
for Infrared
Devices

Fig. 10. (a) Status of appliances shown on the web server. (b) Webpage
showing the command mode.

socket_create()

Module ID

Socket ID

Function
Code

Trailer
0X39

Command format for wired devices.

First Byte

Second Byte

Third Byte

Fourth Byte

Fifth Byte

Sixth Byte

Leader
0X39

Module ID
0x00

Device
Code

Function
Code

Extension
Function Code

Trailer
0X39

Fig. 13.

Command format for devices controlled by IR remoter.

power of a resistive device, i.e., a 60W tungsten lamp, in Fig.

16. We control the power of the tungsten lamp in a far-end
place on the Internet. Different power of the tungsten lamp,
i.e., power off, half power, and full power, can all be controlled
successfully as can be seen in Fig. 16.

socket_connect()

VI. C ONCLUSION

socket_write()

socket_read()

No

No

Transmission
termination?

Yes

socket_close()
Fig. 11. Connection process to the home gateway by using the PHP Socket
on the web server.

B. Communication Protocols
In this subsection, we introduce three kinds of command
format used in the proposed architecture, i.e., the command
format for wired devices (Fig. 12), the command format for
devices controlled by IR remoter (Fig. 13), and that of the
acknowledgement from devices (Fig. 14).
The third byte in Fig. 12 is due to that we have three power
sockets in each IPS module. Therefore, we have to indicate
which number of the power socket is to be controlled. Indeed,
we have already registered the name of the device connected to
each power socket on the database before the control process.
In addition, the Module ID 0X00 in the second byte of Fig.
13 is reserved for devices that have to be controlled by IR
remoter. The third byte, i.e., Device Code, in Fig. 13 is to
select the device to be controlled, e.g., TV or air conditioner.

Aimed to facilitate the life of human beings as well as

to use the limited power energy more efciently, we propose
in this paper a technology that can perform remote control
and monitoring of electrical appliances on the Internet. To
do this, an intelligent power socket (IPS) module that is able
to control and monitoring the power of electricity has been
realized successfully in this research. The IPS modules are
placed in conjunction with the electrical appliances that are to
be controlled from a far-end place. In addition, an embedded
system-based home gateway that can be connected with the
Internet is set up in which the electrical appliances are located.
Moreover, the acquired power consumption information or the
status of the appliances are all stored in a database server in
the Cloud. With the proposed structure, authorized users or the
system manager can log into the web server which connected
with the database, monitoring the power status and take actions
on the appliances remotely. The control command from the
far-end place, i.e., from the web server on the Internet, is
rst sent to the home gateway and then transmitted to the IPS

Command
format
for Ack

First Byte

Second Byte

Third Byte

Fourth Byte

Fifth Byte

Leader
0x39

Module ID

Socket ID

Status Code

Trailer
0x39

Fig. 14.

Command format for acknowledgement from devices.

V. E XPERIMENTS
In this section, we show in Fig. 15.(a) the front view and
Fig. 15.(b) the side view of the designed IPS module. As can
be seen in Fig. 15, every IPS module has three power sockets,
and individual power socket is controlled by different SSR.
We also examine the proposed architecture by controlling the

(a)

(b)

Fig. 15. (a) Front view of the IPS with Zigbee transceiver. (b) Side view of
the IPS with Zigbee transceiver.

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R EFERENCES

(a) The IPS with a tungsten lamp.

(b) Power off status.

(c) Half power status.

(d) Full power status.

Fig. 16. (a) The test platform, an IPS with a 60W tungsten lamp. (b)(d) When the lamp is in off state, half power state, and full power state,
respectively.

modules through the Zigbee wireless communication protocol

so that the remote control of appliances can be achieved.
The proposed architecture can be easily applied to any kind
of room space. Moreover, only a browser is needed for the
client to communicate with the web server, no other application
program is required. As the browser is now available almost
on every information technology products, e.g., a notebook or
a smart phone, the proposed architecture has been shown to
be very convenient and useful, and hence can facilitate the life
of human being.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank the National Science
Council of Taiwan for nancial support of the research (under
Grant No. NSC 100-2221-E-027 -078).

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