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IoT-based LED lighting control in smart home

Conference Paper · April 2018

DOI: 10.1109/ICASI.2018.8394405

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 Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Applied System Innovation 2018
IEEE ICASI 2018- Meen, Prior & Lam (Eds)

IoT-Based LED Lighting Control in Smart Home

Chih-Lin Hu+, Tzu-Kuan Chan+, Yunh-Chun Wen+, Thitinan Tantidham^, Snit Sanghlao^, Boonsit
Yimwadsana^, and Pattanasak Mongkolwat^
+
Department of Communication Engineering, National Central University, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
300 Zhong-da Road, Zhong-li District, Taoyuan City, Taiwan 32001, R.O.C.
clhu@ce.ncu.edu.tw, {105553015; 105553030}@cc.ncu.edu.tw
^
Faculty of Information Communication Technology, Mahidol University, Thailand
999 Phuttamonthon 4 Road, Salaya, Nakhon Pathom, 73170, Thailand
{thitinan.tan, snit.san, boonsit.yim, pattanasak.mon}@mahidol.ac.th

Abstract Node-RED visualization development platform to support

service description and execution, and use MQTT protocols
This paper proposes a micro-IoT architecture for LED lighting [2][3][4] to exchange real-time and low-bandwidth messages
and diming control in smart homes. The proposed solution among home gateways and the cloud services. In addition, we
integrates not only open software platforms on front-end devices adopt low-energy, white LEDs as the lighting source, and select
and the cloud server, but also presents hardware specifications to an LED driver that is associated with a constant current pulse
LED lighting control equipment. Prototypical development width modulation (PWM) feedback power supply with a power
exhibits scenarios, usages and real testing data. Results show our factor correction function, so as to improve both energy
design can attain low energy consumption and high accuracy of efficiency and comfort of use. As a result of combining IoT and
dimming ratio in regard to cloud-based lighting control services. cloud services, a home user can be cognizant of environmental
factors, and control lighting equipment by the cloud services and
Keywords: Lighting control, home automation, smart home, mobile devices, anytime and anywhere. Furthermore, we believe
cloud service, Internet of Things (IoT). that the research effort in this paper can be used as a basis for the
development of home energy management system (HEMS). Also,
Introduction the volume of collected data on the cloud can provide a reference
for new services after the analysis of big data.
Using environmental monitoring sensors, wireless networks, The rest of this article is organized in several sections,
and cloud services to control LED lighting becomes a promising including preliminary knowledge of smart home and lighting
approach to reduce energy dependence in smart homes [1]. At control technologies, our design considerations, a proposed
present, most of remote lighting systems offer only short-range system architecture and implementation, system integration and
wireless network control. They do not provide timely control experimental testing, and finally, the conclusion.
across the clouds and adjustable energy-saving features with
different electrical characteristics. Without integrating all of Background & Preliminary Knowledge
networks, devices and service platforms, a system cannot
immediately distribute timely and relevant information to users Traditional dimming control devices use a triode for
after the collection of environmental sensing data on the cloud. alternative current (TRIAC) switch module and perform phase
Thus, the actual energy reduction is limited yet in smart homes. dimming according to pre-defined usage cases. Such a lighting
In addition, the low-frequency flicker effect produced by and dimming control system can lack mobility due to the physical
dimming lamps will cause the human eyes to fatigue increasingly. circuit and generate a large amount of power consumption. To
This paper proposes a remote LED lighting and dimming improve this common drawback in traditional control devices,
control system based on IoT technologies in home living recent systems use wireless communications and constant current
environments. This system presents a micro-IoT framework, pulse width modulation (PWM) control instead for the purpose
which consists of three sub-systems, including cloud-, user-side, of energy saving and flexible connectivity and usage.
and equipment-sides, and supports a set of GUI-based human- PWM is a technology that directly converts digital signals into
machine interfaces, message exchange protocols, and LED driver periodic pulses and adjusts the duty cycle of the control signal to
and dimming functions. Then, this system can bi-directionally achieve an accurate ratio. Because signals do not need to be
connect the cloud, as well as the IoT home gateways, devices and transferred over electronic components, this technique thus
sensors. Devices at home can continuously report lighting- and consumes little energy on the network. Therefore, PWM is
energy-related data to the cloud. The cloud can process data suitable for basic signal controls on green energy appliances, etc.
gathering and analysis, and then command a home gateway to for realizing Home Energy Management System (HEMS).
controls on those devices in the house. Many smart dimming systems begin to use wireless
Regarding practical development and implementation, we communications, e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, to intereact
deploy the backend services on IBM Bluemix Cloud, utilize the with the system hosts or mobile phones. For example, [5] showed

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IEEE ICASI 2018- Meen, Prior & Lam (Eds)

how mobile phone can operate remote dimming commands over dimmer as a controller. To reduce power consumption, the
Bluetooth. However, this scenario is limited to a remote control lighting equipment must have an LED power supply that can
service in a short-range network area covered by a Bluetooth accept PWM functions.
transmission range. Also, this kind of design often results in a
hardware platform-dependent customization, and its System Architecture
development may become complicated.
Remote lighting systems currently developed by most A micro-IoT system framework for a cloud-based lighting
manufacturers, e.g., LIFX's Color-1000 bulb [6] and Philips- control and dimming service includes three sub-systems,
HUE bulb [7], are merely used for short-range wireless network including cloud-, user-side and equipment-sides, which supports
control. Most of them do not provide cloud-integrated services a set of GUI-based human-machine interfaces, a lightweight
and adjustable energy saving functions. So, actually their effects messaging protocols, and LED driver and dimming functions.
of reducing energy are limited. Those systems are mainly applied
to special application contexts like personal decoration and A. Cloud Side
indirectly illumination, they can induce a low-frequency flicker Our cloud-based control interface is built on The Node-RED
and increase fatigue to human eyes if applied to general dimming provided by the IBM Bluemix IoT platform that enables resource
lamps for illumination in main contexts. Although some systems sharing to achieve economies of scale. Observe that there will
use the cloud to store data, its users cannot receive relevant also be smart services to help home appliances in the future. The
information immediately if there is no integrated cloud services. Node-RED control platform serves as a small and smart home
Special software and applications should be operated yet. The service platform for personal control services. This platform can
usage and operation might be complicated and not easy to use. provide a web-based power control switch to operate the light
This paper intends to integrate PWM, wireless bulb, i.e., ON/OFF, to adjust brightness, as well as to use the
communications, cloud services to present a micro-IoT system MQTT communication model, as shown in Fig. 1.
architecture for new lighting services, thereby alleviating the MQTT is used as a lightweight communication protocol
dependency of hardware and software, as well as achieving because this protocol cost lower overhead and bandwidth
energy conservation to some extent. occupancy than those of traditional TCP/IP network protocols
will do. With a broker that plays the role of a forwarding agent,
Design Consideration users will post and subscribe topics of interest to a broker, and
then, the broker will push messages in one-to-one or one-to-many
To support the management and control of IoT devices on a manner. Because of the increasing number of IoT devices in a
cloud-based lighting dimming system, this section explains four serving area, MQTT is thus addressed to compete with the CoAP
functional requirements for the design of the proposed system communication model that merely offers the one-to-one manner.
architecture. By contrast, using the traditional NAT communication model
(1) Providing a graphical cloud interface -- To allow users not will cause distinct devices isolated. That says, devices do not
confined to a fixed area, it is necessary for the system to know their neighbor devices even though they locate in the same
provide a graphical cloud user interface by which a user can area with more complicated NAT network settings, this matter
conveniently control the lamps and quickly interpret the which makes the application design more difficult.
sensor information.
(2) Providing a cloud-based development platform with the
function of storing quantitative data -- The use of cloud
development platform is mainly to reduce the cost of network
resources, to share resources and offer integrated services. If
a large amount of data collected by sensors is stored in the
front-end infrastructure, it will increase the burden on the
network resources and increase the cost of equipment Fig. 1. MQTT over the cloud.
deployment.
(3) Providing a lightweight communications protocols suitable B. User Side
for instant messaging with QoS specification -- To provide The Bluemix IoT platform provides a fixed URL service for
real-time transmission functions and solve the problem of developer to specify a self-defined name. On this platform, users
network congestion, selecting a lightweight communication can access a specific web page to operate the services. In our
protocol with QoS and security policies is one key technology. design, this web page comprises two components, including real-
(4) Providing LED energy-saving lighting equipment equipped time temperature and humidity display and long-time cumulative
with remote control on PWM lighting dimming functions -- chart, as well as lamp control, as shown in Fig. 2.
On the issue of improving dimming and energy consumption The temperature and humidity display at the left side of Fig. 3
of traditional lamps and lanterns, energy-saving LED lamps can instantly display the current environmental status and be
and lanterns are often used in place of traditional lamps. updated periodically. Each collected data is recorded as an input
However, at this stage, dimmable power supply devices in of the cumulative chart at the right side of Fig. 3. Through the
LED lamps still use the extremely energy-consuming TRIAC cumulated charts, the data can be integrated and analyzed on the

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 Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Applied System Innovation 2018
IEEE ICASI 2018- Meen, Prior & Lam (Eds)

transmit data to provide collection and transmission of sensor

data and lighting control and reception over uplink and downlink
channels on the micro-IoT platform. The following describes
upload and download parts, respectively.
In the uploading aspect of collecting quantitative data, the
temperature and humidity sensor module (Raspberry Pi with
DHT11 sensing module) continually outputs multiple data
objects, and then the Node-RED packetizes those data through
the JSON-specific format into MQTT packets. All MQTT
packets are sent to the MQTT broker on the cloud. After
receiving, parsing and interpret the MQTT broker’s broadcast
messages, the Bluemix Node-RED on the cloud will display the
Fig. 2. A graphic user interface on the cloud platform. information via the Node-RED UI interface and also store the
quantitative data for cloud-side analysis. To ease the
understanding of practical development on the above design, Fig.
3 depicts the procedural flow based on the Node-RED platform.
In the downloading aspect of controlling lighting fixtures,
white light-emitting diodes (White-LEDs) are commonly used as
the light sources particularly in lighting energy reduction, for that
White-LEDs have the advantage of high luminous efficiency
(Lm/W) with low energy consumption and high luminous flux.
Particularly, in order to design an LED power supply that can
use the PWM dimming signal input function, our design adopts
the power factor correction to the system architecture. Definitely,
by sampling the AC voltage waveform signal to composite the
power feedback signal, so that the AC current and voltage phase
can be synchronized. This way will reduce the virtual power
Fig. 3. A Node-RED procedural flow in the front-end consumption of electrical equipment, thereby reducing energy
device. loss and improving power quality, Hence, the power factor is an
cloud. For example, depending on the temperature difference and important indicator to assess the power-saving effects of
the humidity difference in the indoor cumulative charts, it can be electrical devices.
determined whether the air conditioner is on or off. Such kind of In regard to a practical dimming circuit design, the constant
information can offer a reference for basic analysis on device voltage PWM output mode is a commonly used circuit design.
utilization in daily-time scale. Here, timely and continually Considering the user's comfort to the lighting space, however, the
uploaded data can present an upstream channel over the proposed constant voltage mode during fast switching will produce flashes
IoT platform. The service on the cloud will attempt to perform that make the eyes susceptible to fatigue. Besides, the forward
real-time analysis over that upstream, so that the system will be current will exceed the light source withstand current to cause the
able to sense environmental conditions in home areas. LED module damaged or reduced lifetime. It is thus not suitable
In terms of lighting control, the user can control lighting on or for long-time lighting. Instead, our study uses the constant-
off through the user interface with a slider control bar that is of current PWM feedback mode to alleviate this situation.
adjustable precision of 1%. Corresponding to the cloud-based Compared with the constant voltage mode, it has a linear
control interface, the user is able to trigger the change of lighting dimming ratio, high current accuracy, low energy consumption,
and dimming effects, i.e., on , off, and scale dimming, etc. and no flicker effect. Please note that, to save page space, this
Herein, we should note that since the Node-RED platform can paper skips the detail of physical design and chart of the constant
only support the single-input message one by one during the voltage and the constant current PWMs, but focuses on their
judgment period, it is necessary to design a node that is able to relative efforts as compared in the next section.
distinguish prioritized operations among multiple receiving input
messages in a short time. To this end, our way is to save the Prototype & Performance Results
default object temporarily into a discrete slotted period and then
output the correct message after checking relative priority among Our practical implementation constructs a micro-IoT system
messages in each slot. The result is responsively output and then integrating sensor data collection and cloud-based lighting
transmitted to the front-end device to instruct the control control. When the connection between the Raspberry Pi and the
operation in a timely manner. server system on the cloud is built, we manually trigger the Node-
RED node (Inject) on the Raspberry Pi, and then IoT sensor data
C. Device Side over the upstream channel can be displayed via the graphic user
Regarding the functionality on a front-end device, our design interface page. Accordingly, we conduct two experimental tests,
uses the Raspberry Pi 3 to be a bridge device that can receive and as follows.

ISBN 978-1-5386-4342-6
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 Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Applied System Innovation 2018
IEEE ICASI 2018- Meen, Prior & Lam (Eds)

shown in Table I, the constant current feedback mode is better in

terms of overall energy consumption and accuracy of dimming
ratio.

Conclusion

We have proposed a cloud-based lighting dimming systems

that can be used in smart home environments. The research
content first develops a micro-IoT architecture, and then
conducts practical implementation on software and hardware
Fig. 4. A real example (dimming ratio: 50%, 23 W LEDs). integration of a lighting dimming system. After practical
experiments, the results show that this system can provide users
TABLE I with a friendly cloud interface, and its effect is also combined
PERFORMANCE COMPARISON with environmental sensing and monitoring in home
environments. More importantly, the results show that the
lighting and dimming control with constant current PWM mode
can perform better in reducing energy consumption and flash
effects. Our follow-up work will further utilize the machine
learning models to analyze the changes of sensing states and
accordingly propose a mechanism for intelligent lighting
dimming in home environments.

Acknowledgment

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and

Technology, Taiwan, under Contract MOST-106-2218-E-008-
008-MY2.

References
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is minimal, and the loop energy loss can be minimized. Thus. as

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