Hae-Ryong Lee

Remote-controllable and energy-saving room architecture based on ZigBee communication

This paper proposes remote-controllable and energy-saving room architecture to reduce standby power consumption and to make the room easily controllable with an IR remote control of a home appliance. To realize the proposed room architecture, we proposed and designed the automatic standby power cut-off outlet and a ZigBee controller with IR code learning functionality. The proposed power outlet monitors the power consumption for the predetermined time and completely cuts off the power supply when the monitored power is below the threshold. This power outlet has a function of changing the threshold power, which enables any kinds of home appliances to be applied to the power outlet. To efficiently manage the power outlets and the lights, we proposed the ZigBee controller with IR code learning functionality. The ZigBee controller has several onboard buttons to wake up the power outlets and control the dimming light. By using IR code learning functionality, the ZigBee controller can assign a certain IR code of a remote control of a home appliance to the power outlet or the dimming light. A user can control the power outlets and the dimming light with an IR remote control of any home appliance. Our proposed room architecture provides the remote-controllable and energy-saving room.

Energy Efficient Home Gateway Based on User Service Traffic in Always-On Home Network Environment

Home gateway (HG) is a device that connects multiple home network devices to an access network. The HG is to be always in operating state for providing any requested digital home services without suspension and users waiting because these services can be started at any time, by any device and from any network. Furthermore, most home network devices are also required to be ready to operate at any time in the digital home environment. We call this characterized digital home network by always-on home network. The characteristic of the always-on in home network environment gives rise to consume more electrical power. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme to reduce the power consumed by a HG and the architecture to implement the proposed HG. The proposed scheme uses sleep and wake-up mechanism based on existence of real data traffic for user service. In the proposed scheme, almost hardware components of the HG are working, power-on, only in the period that some user service traffic is in the proposed HG; wake-up state or normal stat. On the other hand, some hardware components such as network protocol agent (NPA) with low power consumption are working in the period of no user service traffic. The NPA controls these sleep and wake-up for the proposed HG with cooperating with CPU.