Fast Device Discovery for Remote Device Management in Lighting Control Networks

Abstract

The Remote Device Management (RDM) protocol is used to manage the devices in the lighting control networks. RDM provides bi-directional communications between a controller and many lighting devices over the DMX512-A network. In RDM, using a simple binary search scheme, which is based on the 48-bit unique ID (UID) of each device, discovers the lighting devices. However, the existing binary search scheme tends to require a large delay in the device discovery process. In this paper, we propose a novel partition-based discovery scheme for fast device discovery in RDM. In the proposed scheme, all devices are divided into several partitions as per the device UID, and the controller performs device discovery for each partition by configuring a response timer that each device will use. From numerical simulations, we can see that there is an optimal number of partitions to minimize the device discovery time for a given number of devices in the proposed scheme, and also that the proposed partition-based scheme can reduce the device discovery time, as compared to the existing binary search scheme.