Home energy management leveraging open IoT protocol stack

The demand for energy is ever increasing thanks to population growth and industrial development. Efficient energy management at home will be possible provided there is an increased awareness among consumers on their consumption patterns and effective use of their appliances. In India, utility companies continue to gather much of the energy utilization data manually and the automation in home energy metering is yet to be achieved as the smart meter adoption is still in its early stages. While addressing automation in home energy management, it is important to consider solutions that meet country-specific needs like energy costs, fair billing, electricity thefts, system scalability and reliability. In this paper, we present a prototype implementation for home energy management and control, leveraging Internet of Things protocol stack comprising emerging IETF standards such as 6Lo WPAN, RPL and CoAP. The open standards based approach enables seamless integration of the appliances at home to the existing internet infrastructure making remote monitoring, control and data collection over the web possible. Further, enabling IPv6 connectivity to the energy meter leads to better integration of the Data Management Systems of utilities unlike some of the existing proprietary solutions. In our IoT based and IPv6 network connected system, we have a PV panel to generate electricity for DC appliances apart from the main 230V AC supply. Considering the fact that energy supply from renewable sources is intermittent, we provide users with an option of choosing either of the energy sources over the internet. Wireless node based on CC2538 System-on-Chip is interfaced with an energy meter connected to the main AC supply, providing 2 way communications between the utility and the consumer over the internet. The sensor nodes are also used to measure the power consumed by the DC appliances and remote actuation control. Further, a timing based approach is provided for consumers to "turn on" appliances at preset time periods. All the data collected by the sensor nodes are communicated in real time over the internet to the utility and consumer via a border router.