A new control protocol for home appliances-LnCP

This paper proposes a new control protocol, LnCP (Living network Control Protocol), targeted at low implementation cost networking system in a home environment. The protocol is based on a multi-master system and uses a peer-to-peer communication model. The protocol assumed single bus therefore the appliances can be attached to the bus anywhere if the power lines are employed as the network bus. Home appliances linked via LnCP are controlled and monitored at remote place. Every device communicates with each other in packet unit, which has variable length so that the protocol can deal with the devices having the diverse room of RAM resource. The bytes number of the packet header is also variable in order that the new function can be added in the future. The minimum hardware requirements to implement the protocol are 8-bit processing microcomputer including built-in UART, 17 bytes of volatile memory and a few bytes of nonvolatile memory. Therefore it may be embedded in low-cost microcontrollers that are employed in white goods such as refrigerators, washing machines, micro oven ranges and even light switches.