Collaborative Load Management in Smart Home Area Network

An efficient Home Area Network (HAN) acts as a base of an Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). A HAN not only facilitates AMI with efficient real-time monitoring of the electricity consumption but also manages the load profile of the whole system. However, the existing works on implementing HAN are mostly centralized and suffer from well-known problems. In this work, we propose an IoT-based efficient decentralized strategy using synchronous transmission to practically realize HAN. An inter-device coordination strategy is proposed to minimize the peak load as well as reduce the sudden changes in the overall system without compromising the user’s requirements. Through experiments over IoT-testbeds, we demonstrate that the proposed strategy can reduce the peak load upto 50% and reduce the load variations upto 58% for even a high and random rate of requests for execution of power-hungry house appliances.