Interactive remote control of legacy home appliances through a virtually wired sensor network

With the advance of wireless communications technology, home automation based on home networks has regained attention. This paper proposes a wireless network protocol and a control device, which make it possible to control legacy home appliances in an interactive way. The proposed wireless network protocol provides a bidirectional communication channel between a gateway and control devices. The control device hooked up to the wireless network controls a legacy home appliance requested by a user using IR signals and returns the result of the control action as a digested image so that the user can determine if the control operation has been conducted properly. The feasibility of the network protocol and control device is demonstrated by an experiment in which a wireless network is constructed using the proposed network protocol and TVs and air conditioners are controlled via the wireless network and the result is fed back to the user.