Abstract—The design and development of a smart monitoring col (IP) specification, and the IEEE 802.15.4g standard to help
and controlling system for household electrical appliances in real Japan to create smart homes that improve energy management
time has been reported in this paper. The system principally mon- and efficiency [6].
itors electrical parameters of household appliances such as volt-
age and current and subsequently calculates the power consumed. It is expected that 65 million households will equip with smart
The novelty of this system is the implementation of the control- meters by 2015 in the United States, and it is a realistic estimate
ling mechanism of appliances in different ways. The developed of the size of the home energy management market [7].
system is a low-cost and flexible in operation and thus can save There are several proposals to interconnect various domestic
electricity expense of the consumers. The prototype has been exten- appliances by wireless networks to monitor and control such
sively tested in real-life situations and experimental results are very
encouraging. as provided in [8], [9]. But the prototypes are verified using
test bed scenarios. Also, smart meter systems like [9]–[11] have
Index Terms—Energy management, home automation, intelli- been designed to specific usages particularly related to geo-
gent control system, wireless sensor network, ZigBee.
graphical usages and are limited to specific places. Different
information and communication technologies integrating with
I. INTRODUCTION smart meter devices have been proposed and tested at different
T is foreseen that service and personal care wireless mecha- flats in a residential area for optimal power utilization [12], [13],
I tronic systems will become more and more ubiquitous at
home in the near future and will be very useful in assistive
but individual controlling of the devices are limited to specific
houses.
healthcare particularly for the elderly and disabled people [1]. There has been design and developments of smart meters
Wireless mechatronic systems consist of numerous spatially dis- predicting the usage of power consumption [9]–[13]. How-
tributed sensors with limited data collection and processing ca- ever, a low-cost, flexible, and robust system to continuously
pability to monitor the environmental situation. Wireless sensor monitor and control based on consumer requirements is at the
networks (WSNs) have become increasingly important because early stages of development. In this study, we have designed
of their ability to monitor and manage situational information and implemented a ZigBee-based intelligent home energy man-
for various intelligent services. Due to those advantages, WSNs agement and control service. We used the ZigBee (the IEEE
has been applied in many fields, such as the military, industry, 802.15.4 standard) technology for networking and communi-
environmental monitoring, and healthcare [2]–[4]. cation, because it has low-power and low-cost characteristics,
The WSNs are increasingly being used in the home for energy which enable it to be widely used in home and building envi-
controlling services. Regular household appliances are moni- ronments [10].
tored and controlled by WSNs installed in the home [5]. New The paper focuses on human-friendly technical solutions for
technologies include cutting-edge advancements in information monitoring and easy control of household appliances. The in-
technology, sensors, metering, transmission, distribution, and habitant’s comfort will be increased and better assistance can be
electricity storage technology, as well as providing new infor- provided. This paper emphasizes the realization of monitoring
mation and flexibility to both consumers and providers of elec- and controlling of electrical appliances in many ways.
tricity. The ZigBee Alliance, wireless communication platform The developed system has the following distinct features.
is presently examining Japan’s new smart home wireless system 1) Use of Traic with opto-isolated driver for controlling elec-
implication by having a new initiative with Japan’s Government trical appliances: Household appliances are controlled ei-
that will evaluate use of the forthcoming ZigBee, Internet Proto- ther remotely or automatically with the help of fabricated
smart sensing unit consisting of triac –BT138 [14].
2) No microprocessor/microcontroller: The design of smart
sensing unit does not require a processing unit at the sens-
Manuscript received May 31 2013; revised October 16, 2013; accepted ing end.
January 14, 2014. Recommended by Technical Editor Y. Li.
The authors are with the School of Engineering and Advanced Tech- 3) Flexibility in controlling the appliances: Depending on
nology, Massey University, Palmerston North 4474, New Zealand (e-mail: the user requirements, appliances can be monitored and
suryadevara99@gmail.com; s.c.mukhopadhyay@massey.ac.nz; seandtkelly@ controlled in different ways. Section III-B discusses about
gmail.com; satinderpalg@gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online the various options of controlling the devices.
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II dis-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMECH.2014.2301716 cusses the related work and investigation of WSN’s constraints
1083-4435 © 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
SURYADEVARA et al.: WSN-BASED SMART SENSORS AND ACTUATOR FOR POWER MANAGEMENT IN INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS 3
where Pact is the actual power, Vrm s and Irm s are the RMS
values of voltage and current, respectively, and Pf is the power
factor.
The output signal of the current transformer completely de-
pends on the nature of the connected appliances whether the
connected load is purely resistive, capacitive, or inductive. In
most of the domestic appliances, the output waveforms are not
pure sinusoidal as shown in the following graphs Fig. 7(a)–(d)
for different loading conditions. From the graphs, it is inferred
that zero-crossing determination is difficult to measure for some
of the appliances and elimination of noise is not trivial. More-
over, it is not important for this application to measure power
with zero error.
Fig. 5. Scaling factor (m2) of current signal.
Hence, in our paper, instead of measuring power factor, we
have introduced correction factor to normalize the received
power with respect to the actual power based on the scaling
factors of the voltage and current measured. The power con-
sumed by the appliances is calculated in the computer system
after receiving voltage outputs from corresponding current and
voltage sensors by the following equation:
SURYADEVARA et al.: WSN-BASED SMART SENSORS AND ACTUATOR FOR POWER MANAGEMENT IN INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS 5
TABLE I
PERCENTAGE ERROR OF RECEIVED VOLTAGE, CURRENT, AND
MEASURED POWER
ZigBee network in an IPv6 address. Fig. 8 shows the address Fig. 9. Smart power monitoring and control system at the residence.
transformation of ZigBee and IPv6 packet.
The software used on the internet gateway to transmit data
globally is the Linux-Open WRT [25]. This is basically router
firmware software providing the networking architecture to par-
ticipate in many types of internetworks. In order to remotely
monitor and control the household appliances the residential
internet gateway uses the Openwrt software to link to the inter-
networking protocol. These networks are embedded into internet
routers and gateways for broadcasting data globally. The sensed
data is forwarded through a tunneling and tapping (tun/tap) de-
vice driver software. The tun/tap acts as virtual network device
software for bridging and routing functionalities (layer 2 and
layer 3) of Internet Protocol (IPv6).
D. Storage of Data
The ZigBee packets produced at the gateway encapsulate
sample data to be sent to windows based internet server. An
application on the server receives packets on an arbitrary port
and stores the relevant information in the background of MySQL Fig. 10. Graphical user interface of smart power monitoring and control sys-
tem at the local residence.
database in the computer.
The database table store information such as source address,
time, source channel, and sense data. Rows are added to this monitoring consumption of power of the appliances, data are
table for each packet received. This allows samples to be sorted collected by a smart coordinator, which saves all data in the sys-
by time, sensor node, and sensor channel. tem for processing as well as for future use. The parameters will
In the present system, programs for address, packet transfor- be entered in the data coordinator in software from appliances
mations, and data transmission are written using “C” program- include voltage, current, and power. These parameters will be
ming language, programs for packet reception and data storage stored in a database and analyzed. Collected data will be dis-
are written using “C#,” and Web interface is developed using played on the computer through graphic user interface (GUI)
PHP Script and Java Scripts. window so that appropriate action can be taken from the GUI.
Fig. 9 shows the smart power monitoring and control system at
a house where the system is on trial.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS The processed voltage, current, and power values are dis-
The prototype is in operation in a trial home with various elec- played on the graphical user interface running on a computer.
trical appliances regularly used by an inhabitant. The following The processed data are accurate and user friendly. The sensing
appliances were tested: room heaters, microwave, oven, toasters, system in the sensor node measures the parameters (voltage and
water kettle, fridge, television, audio device, battery chargers, current). The raw data (i.e., converted ADC values) are trans-
and water pump. In total, ten different electrical appliances were mitted to the coordinator. The computer then collects the data
used in the experimental setup; however, any electrical appli- from the coordinator and processes them. The computer then
ance whose power consumption is less than 2000 W can be used applies the necessary formulas to get the actual voltage, current,
in developed system. and power consumption of the electrical appliances. The voltage
The sampling rate for the fabricated sensing modules was and current readings are processed using C sharp programming.
setup with 50 Hz, so that electrical appliance usages within Fig. 10 shows the front end of the smart software system at the
(less than 10 s) interval of time will be recorded correctly. By local residence.
This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.
SURYADEVARA et al.: WSN-BASED SMART SENSORS AND ACTUATOR FOR POWER MANAGEMENT IN INTELLIGENT BUILDINGS 7
Fig. 12. Secured webpage for controlling appliances remotely after successful
authorized login.
[2] D. S. Ghataoura, J. E. Mitchell, and G. E. Matich, “Networking and appli- Nagender Kumar Suryadevara received the
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[3] P. Cheong, K.-F. Chang, Y.-H. Lai, S.-K. Ho, I.-K. Sou, and K.-W. Tam, Kamaraj University, India, in 1998. He is currently
“A zigbee-based wireless sensor network node for ultraviolet detection of working toward the Ph.D. degree at the School of
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2011. versity, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
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pp. 4487–4494, Oct. 2011. in different international journals and conference proceedings, and as book
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0b4b/0900766b80b4bf38.pdf is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, U.K. He is a
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[21] W. Huiyong, W. Jingyang, and H. Min, “Building a smart home system
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Mechatronics Autom., Hong Kong, China, 2013, pp. 353–356. gree from Massey University, Palmerston North, New
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based home monitoring system for wellness determination of elderly,” He is currently with Massey University. His cur-
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