Energy management using a situational awareness-centric ad-hoc network in a home environment

Abstract

Energy management theory and techniques for home environments are facing several technical challenges in areas including the real-time scheduling, power distribution, and automation of network of home appliances/renewables for achieving maximum energy efficiency. In this paper, situational awareness (SA) has made this crucial decision making process more efficient, by providing the valuable data about the surrounding environment. In a smart home, apart from the electrical appliances, the intelligent sensors are also consuming energy while transmitting data or when they are in idle mode. In this contribution, our focus is on implementing and analysing a situational awareness-based ad-hoc network in a home environment, in order to reduce the energy consumption, and therefore, increasing the lifetime of these networks. The presented results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SA-centric method, and further confirm the energy consumption in the intended environment is decreased dramatically due to the applied schedule and limitations on the working hours of the devices. Moreover, the sensors are switched to doze mode when there is no data to exchange.