IOT Smart Home Solutions
Source: Nanjing Yuantuo
Date: 2011/11/30
Smart Home Background Introduction
The conception of smart home comes very earlier, but there was no specific architectural case until 1984. In 1984, United Techno1ogies Building System applied the construction equipment informatization and integration conception to the City-Place-Building in Hartford, Connecticut, USA. Then the first “Intelligent Building” appeared and it opened the prelude of smart home which made the whole world start to scramble for.
At present, it is usually defined the smart home as using computer, network and comprehensive wiring technology to integrate various subsystems related to daily life into one system through the household information management platform.
Specifically speaking, firstly, a communication network needs to be established in the household to provide the necessary access for the information. Under the control of the home network operating system, it can achieve the controlling and monitoring the home appliances and equipments through corresponding hardware and actuating mechanism. Secondly, a network platform is needed to provide the channel to communicate with outside and meet the demand of the controlling, monitoring and exchanging message. Lastly, it satisfies people’s need of safety, comfort, convenience and environmental protection.
Not only the changing of social-economic structures, population structures and information technology but also the raising demand of safety, comfort and efficiency for home environment greatly increase the market needs for smart home. At the same time, more and more family not just require smart home product to meet the basic needs, they focus and require more for simpleness, convenience and safety of the smart home, especially on functional expansion, extension and service.
Introduction and Comparison of Smart Home
Technology
Though the conception of smart home comes out very earlier and the market for smart home exists for a long time, it is restricted by the technology breakthrough and it hasn’t been widely popularized. The technologies for Smart Home in the existing market are as follows:
1. Wired Mode
All the control signals are transferred by wired mode and the signal wires in controlling end are too many to check when problems happened. This mode has lots of prominent disadvantages such as complex cabling, high workload, high-cost, difficult to maintenance and difficult to build network. All of these make the smart home stayed in the conception and pilot level, thus it is very hard for smart home to be widely popularized.
2. Wireless Mode
The wireless system applied to Smart home should have the following characteristics:
1) low power consumption
2) Stabilization
3) easy to expand grid
As for the transmission speed, it is obvious not the key point for this application.
For now, there are several wireless modes for smart home as below:
Bluetooth:
Bluetooth is kind of wireless technology supporting equipments short distances communication (in the range of 10 meters). In this mode, information can be transferred between devices such as mobile phones, PDA, wireless earphone and laptop etc. While, this communication distance is too short and this communication mode is the point-to-point, so this kind of technology can’t meet the requirements for Smart home.
WIFI:
WIFI is another name of IEEE 802.11b which was released by the WECA（Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance）. It is kind of short distance transmission technology which supports the radio signals within several hundreds meters to connect with the Internet. The biggest feature of WIFI is that it is very easy for people to access the Internet at any time and any where. Thus, WIFI is widely spread. However, to Smart home system it has obvious disadvantages such as high-consumption and strong professional networking. High-consumption is a fatal weakness to map out the low-consumption sensors in the network. So, it can only play the auxiliary role in Smart home.
315M/433M/868M/915M：
These wireless RF technologies are widely used in vehicle monitoring, remote control, telemeter, small wireless network, industry data acquisition system, wireless label, identity recognition and non-contact RF places etc. It has been applied to the smart home system by some companies, however, because of bad anti-jamming ability, hard networking and general reliability, the application effect in Smart home is not good and it was abandoned at last by the main manufacturers.
Zigbee:
Zigbee is based on the IEEE 802.15. Because IEEE only deals with the protocol of MAC layer and physical layer, Zigbee Alliance expand the IEEE and standardize the network layer protocol and API. Zigbee is a new wireless network technique with short range, low-speed rate and low -power consumption, and it mainly applies to short distance communication.
The characteristics of Zigbee are low-complexity, low-power consumption, low-speed rate, low-cost, Ad hoc network, high reliability and BVR. It mainly applies to the field of the automatic control and remote control, besides, it can be embedded into many types of equipments. In a word, Zigbee is a wireless short distance communication technology with convenience、low-power consumption、Ad hoc network.
To understand the smart home under the background of the IOT
The initially application fields of Zigbee technology mainly include consumer electronics, energy management, Healthcare, home automation, building automation and industrial automation. With the rise of IOT, Zigbee gets new application opportunities again. At the edge of the IOT network what are most applied are sensors and the control modules which are the basis, core and most widely used units constitute in IOT. Under the Zigbee network, thousands of tiny sensing transmission units mutually coordinate to communicate. These units need very little energy and the data will relay from a network node to another through radio wave, so it has very high communication efficiency. The characteristics of Zigbee technique is low-power, anti-jamming, high reliability, easy to network, easy to expand, easy to apply, easy to maintain. So Zigbee products can deployed on a large scale which conforms to the request and trend of IOT development. As it is, IOT and Zigbee technology have huge fusions in the aspect of smart home, industry monitoring and Healthcare.
Remarkable, the rise of IOT will bring a wide market to Zigbee. The purpose of IOT is combining a huge network by connecting various information sensing transmission units with the Internet. In this huge network, taking the data transmission into consideration, Zigbee has lots of advantages in investment, construction and maintenance when comparing to other wireless technologies, so Zigbee will be certainly widely applied to the Smart home.
Solution Selection
As a standard Smart home, it needs to cover a wide range of applications, but there is a precondition that any of general consumers can easily install the system, even expand the system without qualified installation person installing on-site. A typical Smart home system usually requires the following devices/equipments:
No. Product Name Model Remark
1 Wireless Internet Communication Gateway WL-GW-A
2 Wireless Dimmer Switch WL-DS-A01
3 Wireless Temperature Sensor WL-TH-01
4 Current Detection Socket WL-ICS-A01
5 Wireless IR Transmitter WL-ZRFC-01
6 Wireless IR Motion Detector WL-MD-A
7 Carbon Dioxide Sensor WL-AQD-A01
8 Wireless doorbell
9 Wireless Drawer Lock WL-DWS-01
10 Wireless flammable gas valve
11 Wireless Flammable Gas Detector WL-GD-A01B
12 Wireless Automatic Curtain System WL-WCC-01
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