Efficient and cost effective approach to control and monitoring area network (CMAN)

This paper provides an efficient and cost effective solution for controlling and monitoring domestic and industrial electrical devices. Our solution works on a standard local area network using a specially designed hardware interfaced with an embedded Ethernet system using PIC microcontroller. During the course of the project, we developed various solutions to detect the status of any electrical appliance, to transmit its status over the LAN, and to control it using any PC having Internet access. We have modified the ICMP packets for communication among various components of our system. We have modified the data field of the ICMP ping packet into subfields of header and status indicators.