Wireless Home Network Control Mechanism for Standby Power Reduction

Standby power is electric power that a device consumes when not in present use, but plugged in to a source of power and ready to be used. Present estimates indicate that standby power consumption reaches 10 to 15 percent of total residential electrical use. In this paper, we propose a Host-Agent based standby power control mechanism in home network environment. It uses the IEEE 802.15.4 based ZigBee communication protocol between Host and Agent for transmission and secure network. The Agent can acquire the local context information from various embedded sensor and sends the sensing information to the Host. The Host compares this context information from Agent with database and sends the standby power control message to the Agent. To prove the necessity and the efficiency of the proposed control mechanism, we have developed prototype devices and carried out simulation according to control scenario.