2013 Fourth International Conference on Intelligent Control and Information Processing (ICICIP)
June 9 – 11, 2013, Beijing, China
An IoT-based Appliance Control System for Smart Homes
Ming Wang, Guiqing Zhang, Chenghui Zhang, Jianbin Zhang, Chengdong Li
Abstract— With the development of the social economy, more
and more appliances have been presented in a house. It comes
out a problem that how to manage and control these increasing
various appliances efficiently and conveniently so as to achieve
more comfortable, security and healthy space at home. In
this paper, a smart control system base on the technologies
of internet of things has been proposed to solve the above
problem. The smart home control system uses a smart central
controller to set up a radio frequency 433 MHz wireless sensor
and actuator network (WSAN). A series of control modules,
such as switch modules, radio frequency control modules, have
been developed in the WSAN to control directly all kinds of
home appliances. Application servers, client computers, tablets
or smart phones can communicate with the smart central
controller through a wireless router via a Wi-Fi interface.
Since it has WSAN as the lower control layer, a appliance
can be added into or withdrawn from the control system very
easily. The smart control system embraces the functions of
appliance monitor, control and management, home security,
energy statistics and analysis.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Green building refers to a building that is environmentally
responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building’s
life-cycle: from siting to design, construction, operation,
maintenance, renovation, and demolition [1], [2]. To some
extent, an intelligent building can be regarded as a green
house since it pursues the same objectives with the ones of a
green building. A green building constructed is to meet the
requirements of economy, utility, durability, and comfort [3],
[4], [5]. Therefore, that not only requires close cooperation
of the design team, the architects, the engineers, and the
client at all project stages, but also ask for the efficient
operation, control and management of all appliances and
building facilities with a building automation system. While,
people are pursuing ever-growing high quality of their lives
Ming Wang is with School of Control Science and Engineering, Shan-
dong University, Jinan, 250061 China, also with School of Information
and Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, 250101
China.(email: xclwm@sdjzu.edu.cn).
Guiqing Zhang and Chengdong Li are with School of Information and
Electrical Engineering, Shandong Jianzhu University, Jinan, 250101 China.
Chenghui Zhang is with School of Control Science and Engineering,
Shandong University, Jinan, 250061 China.
Jianbin Zhang is with ShenZhen Soben Skysafe Hi-Tech Development
Co. Ltd., Shenzhen, 518033 China.
This work is partially supported by NSFC Grants (61273326, 61074149,
61105077), the Science and Technology Development Program of Higher
Education of Shandong Province (J11LG16), Science and Technology
Development Program of Shandong Province of China(2012GGX10120),
the Excellent Young and Middle-Aged Scientist Award Grant of Shandong
Province of China(BS2012DX026), the Science and Technology Programm
of Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of China (2011-K1-
18), the program of Department of Housing and Urban-Rural Development
of Shandong Province (2011YK022), China Postdoctoral Science Founda-
tion(2012M521337), the Shandong Jianzhu University Doctoral Founda-
tion(XNBS1018), the State Key Laboratory Program of Management and
Control for Complex Systems.
978-1-4673-6249-8/13/$31.00 ©2013 IEEE
today. This leads to more and more facilities and home
appliances poured into their buildings. How to control and
manage these versatile facilities and appliances in a house?
To work out a solution is not easy in that there exists two
obvious main reasons. First, there really are big differences
among these facilities or appliances from the angle of control.
Here the control plant with home appliances is a complex
system. Hence, a simple conventional control system may
do not work. Second, a man in a green building would
expect to occupy a comfort, healthy, security, economy and
convenient space. Therefore, for a control system of a green
building, it can firstly seamlessly integrates all appliances as
an big system with greater efficiency; Then it can provide
a management and optimization strategy for an on-going
system which will generate a series of optimal strategies for
each appliance system to meet occupancies’s requirements.
Home networking is the core to the implementation of an
automation system for a smart home. Lee et. al. designed
a controller area network (CAN) for network-based fire
detection system as the low layer of the BACNet in a
smart home automation. As compared to other low layers
of the BACNet, the CAN has the advantages of low cost
and ease of implementation [6]. There is another different
way to construct a home network. Zhang et. al. proposed an
approach by using power line communication technology to
connect entire intranet and several wireless networking with
home devices. An example system in dishes ordering system
for housewife had shown in their paper to demonstrate the
effectiveness of their work. This network system can reduce
the cost and increase the security and performance of smart
home [7]. While most of the smart home applications are
adopted with wireless networking methods, such as Zigbee,
Wi-Fi, 433 MHz radio frequency (RF) wireless communica-
tion. Kim et. al. developed a low data-rate wireless personal
network with IEEE 802.15.4 which is called Zigbee stan-
dard. They applied the wireless sensor networks to generate
context information and to provide services to users by
controlling wireless networked actuators in smart home [8].
There are many research works done on home networking
with Zigbee [9], [10], [11], [12].
A wireless approach can replace wire harnesses within
home network sensing and control system applications. Fur-
thermore, with the self-configuration and self-organization
technologies, an appliance takes part into or withdraws from
a home network easily. That is very suitable for controlling
ever-increasing facilities and appliances in a house. To figure
out a solution, a smart control system for a home has been
proposed in this paper. The smart control system uses the
technologies of Internet of Things (IoT) which adopts RF
433 MHz wireless sensor and actuator network (WSAN) as
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Fig. 1. The scheme of the smart IoT-based home control system

its low layer. A smart central controller is the core component
of the WSAN which is responsible for organizing and
setting up the wireless network with control modules. Each
appliance is controlled by a corresponding control module.
There are switch module, adjusting module and RF module
for various appliances. For example, a RF module can apply
to an air-conditioner, which has all functions of an air-
conditioner remote controller. Especially, it has another RF
interface through which it can join into a wireless network.
To have access to the internet, a smart central controller
connects to a wireless router with Wi-Fi interface. Therefore,
a remote control device, such as an application server, a
client computer, a tablet, or a smart phone, interacts with
the wireless router via the internet so that remote monitor,
control and management can be carried out effectively.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
presents a smart home control system using the technologies
of IoT, which is suitable for complex control systems. Section
III is the design of the RF 433 MHz wireless sensor and
actuator network of the smart home control system. The
smart home information system is presented in Section IV.
Finally, Section V concludes the paper and describes the
future work.
II. A S MART C ONTROL S YSTEM BASED ON I OT
A smart control system based on the technologies of IoT
has been put forward in this paper, which is shown in the
Fig. 1. The scheme of the control system in Fig. 1 can be
divided into two parts: the upper part and the lower part.
The upper part includes a wireless router, computers, tablets,
smart phones, etc.. A computer, a tablet or a smart phone is
used as a remote controller via the internet. The lower part
consists of a smart central controller, switch modules, RF
modules, adjusting modules, environmental modules, data
collectors, and so on. The smart central controller is a
connecting link between the preceding and the following in
that it combines the upper part and the lower part together.
It is responsible for setting up a RF 433 MHz WSAN in
a home. These versatile control modules are responsible for
controlling appliances and communicating with the central
controller. When a home has been installed such a control
system, the householder can use a smart phone or computer
to monitor home appliances and carry out some operations
remotely, such as turn on or off a light. The smart control
system is very useful because of the following four advan-
tages. Firstly, all the control modules have been designed into
standard sizes to be fixed easily in walls. Secondly, The smart
cental controller and all these modules make up of a WSAN,
which make it need no extra wiring. Thirdly, the smart
home control system keeps a dynamical balance through self-
configuration and self-organization. Fourthly, the smart home
control system is easy to set up and maintain.
The wireless router in the Fig. 1 transits data frames
with the central controller through IEEE 802.11 b/n/g Wi-Fi

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interface. If the wireless router is taken out, the smart central
controller, all kinds of control modules, data collectors and
all appliances would constitute a autonomous control system.
The smart central controller is the key part in the smart home
control system in the Fig. 1, which adopted ARM-based
micro controller STM32F100C8T6B as its core control unit.
The STM32F100C8T6B incorporates the high-performance
ARM CortexTM -M3 32-bit RISC core operating at a 24 MHz
frequency, high-speed embedded memories, and an exten-
sive range of enhanced peripherals and I/Os connected to
two APB buses. It is very suitable for embedded system
applications with more computation. The hardware diagram
of the central controller contains communication part, key
and LCD part, central computing part, and power supply
part. There are three communication interfaces on the central
controller circuit board. Those are Wi-Fi interface, RS485
serial port, and RF 433 MHz interface. The RS485 serial
port is designed to connect controllers or instruments with
RS485 interface. The RF 433 MHz interface is used to set
up the wireless sensor and actuator network. All data are
processed and computed by the smart central computing part.
In fact, it works in the micro controller STM32F100C8T6B.
The householder can monitor and operate home appliances
via the key and LCD part at the spot.
Switch modules and adjusting modules are direct digital
controllers for those appliances in fact. They are nodes in
the WSAN. Each module can receive commands from the
smart central controller and send appliance operation states
to it. A switch module is used to output switch signal. For
example, a switch module can turn a light on or off. While
adjusting module is designed for providing analog outputs.
Hence, an adjusting module can be applied to illumination
adjusting of a adjustable light. It can be also used to control
the open angle of a valve. However, it is not enough for
a switch module or an adjusting module to control an air-
conditioner. Most of home-use air-conditioners today do not
have communication interface. They are operated by RF
remote controllers. Therefore, we designed another kind of
direct digital controllers, which is called RF modules. A
RF module has two RF channels. One is for RF 433 MHz
interface to connect to a WSAN; The other is for controlling
an appliance, such as an air-conditioner, with the same radio
frequency of the original remote controller provided by the
manufacturers. By changing the software, A RF module can
be used to control a TV set too.
III. A W IRELESS SENSOR AND ACTUATOR N ETWORK
Wireless technologies including Zigbee, Wi-Fi, bluetooth,
and 433 MHz wireless communication, have been widely
used in a great deal of applications recently. Both Zigbee
and Wi-Fi are operated in 2.4 GHz band. While 433 MHz
wireless communication uses relatively low frequency band,
which has its own characters. The 433 MHz wireless com-
munication is globally available and license-free. It is ideal
for wireless sensor networking applications since it has the
ability to transmit/receive over very long ranges without
requiring a large power draw on a battery. The low input
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current of typical tag configurations allows for battery pow-
ering on coin cell or thin film batteries for up to 10 years.
However, the data rate of 433 MHz is only 9.6kbps so that it
is suitable for the applications in which only small amount of
data needs to be transmitted. Therefore it is usually applied
for modern control systems. The above WSAN provided by
us has used 433 MHz wireless communication. The WSAN
adopts star topology in which the central controller serves as
the core part and is responsible for constructing the entire
433 MHz wireless network.
The sensor and actuator network uses a control protocol,
which is shown in the Table I. In the Table I, “Len.” is the
abbreviation of “Length”. Here the length of protocol is ten.
Therefore its hexadecimal value is “0x0A”. “Addr.” is the
address of transition. “Type” is the control type. There are
three control types in the communication protocol. Type’s
value is “0x06” that means the data frame is the request
of the corresponding appliance; T ype = 0x07 represents
an acknowledge of a successful control; T ype = 0x08 is a
label of a fail control. “Room” points out which room an
appliance controller module locates at. “Appli.” is on behalf
of an appliance. For example, Appli. = 0x01 indicates a air-
conditioner in a room will be operated by a command from
a smart central controller. “Comd.” takes 2 bytes to store
commands. A command can be a behavior of turn on or off,
or adjusting temperature of a air-conditioner.
TABLE I
433 MH Z W IRELESS N ETWORK C ONTROL P ROTOCOL
Items Volume /bytes Value & description
Head 1 0xFE
Len. 1 0x0A
Addr. 2 the destination address
Type 1 command type, T ype = 0x06 − 0x08
Room 1 a room label
Appli. 1 appliance type
Comd. 2 store commands
CRC 1 0xCC
IV. A S MART H OME I NFORMATION S YSTEM
To manage all appliances in a smart home, it is necessary
to develop a smart home information system (SHIS), which
can be running in a management sever or the owner’s
computer. We designed and developed a SHIS with web
technologies. The SHIS comprises user login authority, home
appliance control, appliance management, contextual mode
control, security system, energy management, data process-
ing and graphical display, etc.. With the function of user login
authority, a household authorized can monitor and control
his appliances via the internet. Appliance control of a SHIS
has two ways to achieve the control aim. One is control
and regulate an appliance independently. Another way is
to control different appliances together with a contextual
mode. A independent control example is shown in Fig. 2.
By using the SHIS, a person can select a appliance for
controlling in his home. If he do not like to control so many
appliances one by one, he can use a contextual mode. In a
contextual mode, people just set a contextual mode. Then the
SHIS will transmit the selection to a smart central controller
through a wireless router. There are four ordinary contextual
modes including at-home, going out, sleeping, getting up.
Beyond of these modes, the SHIS provides another choice,
which is a user definition mode. A user can determine which
appliance should be embraced in a user contextual mode.
This user definition mode function has greatly facilitated
user’s operations.
Fig. 2. The interface of air-conditioner control in the SHIS
Fig. 3. The interface of security system in the SHIS
A security system is very important for a intelligent
building in that it is to provide safety for all the occupancies
and visitors. In the security system of the SHIS, as shown
in Fig. 3, there are options at the front of each security
sensor. Hence, a house holder can configure these security
sensors and make various protection zones for different goals.
For a given home, the householder can organize a defence
or withdraw a defence. When a person is at home, a at-
home security mode can be set up; While there is no one
in a house, a outgoing security mode should be start. Each
security zone has a time schedule so that the householder
can set an appropriate protection time conveniently.
V. C ONCLUSIONS
Home networking and architecture design are very impor-
tant for a smart home automation system. With the devel-
opment of advanced networking technologies, a wireless ap-
proach not only can replace wire harnesses in implementation
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of a smart home automation system, but also is very suitable
for an appliance joining in and withdrawing from a control
network system. The IoT-based smart home control system
proposed in this paper adopts the 433 MHz wireless sensor
and actuator network as its low layer which makes it very
easy for reconfiguration and reorganization. A householder
can implement monitoring, controlling and managing his
appliances at the spot or remotely by a smart terminal
device with internet access. Since the smart home control
system combines 433 MHz wireless sensor and actuator
communication network and internet together, it can be used
to the control of power grid, environment monitoring or
intelligent transportation without needing major change in
the hardware.
Improving building energy efficiency can lower energy
costs and reducing emissions. After constructing a smart
home control system, a vital goal of the future is to manage
all various appliances and optimize the appliances operations.
Hence, Our on-going mission is to study optimal control
strategies for appliance energy-saving applications.
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