Providing a New Energy Management Approach in Smart Homes Using the 6lowpan Protocol

Abstract

Smart home energy management system (HEMS) can be considered as an optimal system of providing energy management services for effective monitoring and management of energy production, power storage and power consumption. HEMS play an important role in improving energy efficiency, reliability and energy conservation. One of the key challenges in the smart home is to reduce power consumption, to decrease the power costs and to increase energy efficiency. Accordingly, in this study a new smart home energy management approach is presented in which a wireless network is used based on 6LOWPAN protocol in the system of communication and smart home area network for communicating between home appliances and intelligent energy management system. The proposed scheduling algorithm for monitoring and controlling of electrical appliances at home is responsible for scheduling and planning the convenient start time for them. Also in this algorithm, the start time can be shifted from peak hour to off-peak ones if the consumable and unnecessary electrical appliances want to start at peak hours and the energy storage system not to be able to provide enough power to get started by using the electrical appliances. In this study, the contiki operating system and Cooja simulator are used to simulate and implement the algorithm. The simulation result indicates that the proposed scheduling algorithm can reduce power consumption and power costs which in turn it can increase the energy efficiency.