DC Grids for Smart LED-Based Lighting: The EDISON Solution

This paper highlights the benefits and possible drawbacks of a DC-based lighting infrastructure for powering Light Emitting Diode (LED)-lamps. It also evaluates the efforts needed for integrating the so called smart lighting and other sensor/actuator based control systems, and compares existing and emerging solutions. It reviews and discusses published work in this field with special focus on the intelligent DC-based infrastructure named EDISON that is primarily dedicated to lighting, but is applicable to building automation in general. The EDISON “PowerLAN” consists of a DC-based infrastructure that offers telecommunication abilities and can be applied to lighting retrofitting scenarios for buildings. Its infrastructure allows simple and efficient powering of DC-oriented devices like LED lamps, sensors and microcontrollers, while offering a wired communication channel. This paper motivates the design choices for organizing DC lighting grids and their associated communication possibilities. It also shows how the EDISON based smart lighting solution is evolving today to include new communication technologies and to further integrate other parts of building management solutions through the OneM2M (Machine to Machine) service bus

Time Slotted Channel Hopping and ContikiMAC for IPv6 Multicast-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

Smart buildings benefit from IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) medium access for creating reliable and power aware wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). As in these networks, sensors are supposed to communicate to each other and with actuators, IPv6 multicast forwarding is seen as a valuable means to reduce traffic. A promising approach to multicast, based on the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is Bidirectional Multicast RPL Forwarding (BMRF). This paper aimed to analyze the performance of BMRF over TSCH. The authors investigated how an adequate TSCH scheduler can help to achieve a requested quality of service (QoS). A theoretical model for the delay and energy consumption of BMRF over TSCH is presented. Next, BMRF’s link layer (LL) unicast and LL broadcast forwarding modes were analyzed on restricted and realistic topologies. On topologies with increased interference, BMRF’s LL broadcast on top of TSCH causes high energy consumption, mainly because of the amount of energy needed to run the schedule, but it significantly improves packet delivery ratio and delay compared to ContikiMAC under the same conditions. In most cases, the LL unicast was found to outperform the LL broadcast, but the latter can be beneficial to certain applications, especially those sensitive to delays

Time Slotted Channel Hopping and ContikiMAC for IPv6 Multicast-Enabled Wireless Sensor Networks

Smart buildings benefit from IEEE 802.15.4e time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) medium access for creating reliable and power aware wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). As in these networks, sensors are supposed to communicate to each other and with actuators, IPv6 multicast forwarding is seen as a valuable means to reduce traffic. A promising approach to multicast, based on the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is Bidirectional Multicast RPL Forwarding (BMRF). This paper aimed to analyze the performance of BMRF over TSCH. The authors investigated how an adequate TSCH scheduler can help to achieve a requested quality of service (QoS). A theoretical model for the delay and energy consumption of BMRF over TSCH is presented. Next, BMRF’s link layer (LL) unicast and LL broadcast forwarding modes were analyzed on restricted and realistic topologies. On topologies with increased interference, BMRF’s LL broadcast on top of TSCH causes high energy consumption, mainly because of the amount of energy needed to run the schedule, but it significantly improves packet delivery ratio and delay compared to ContikiMAC under the same conditions. In most cases, the LL unicast was found to outperform the LL broadcast, but the latter can be beneficial to certain applications, especially those sensitive to delays