DLNA-ZigBee Gateway Architecture and Energy Efficient Sensor Control for Home Networks

In recent years it has been becoming increasingly popular to connect and utilize various types of digital appliances in home network environments. Controlling home sensors via home networks will also be important in the near future. Aiming at energy efficient sensor control in homes, this paper proposes gateway architecture that incorporates ZigBee into the DLNA. This architecture allows interconnection between two networks and enables plug-and-play between one another´s appliances. The architecture works to conserve the power consumption of each device that is part of the sensor network by switching between unicast and broadcast for the sensor data gathering method in accordance with the network conditions. This paper shows the effectiveness of the sensor data gathering method by measuring the power consumption level after implementing this sensor data gathering method into the gateway.