A cloud network-based power management technology for smart home systems

With 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 efficient 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 efficiently, 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 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 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 first 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.