iPower: an energy conservation system for intelligent buildings by wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide a convenient way to monitor the physical environment. Exploiting the context-aware capability of WSN to achieve energy conservation in intelligent buildings is an attractive direction. We therefore propose an intelligent and personalized energy-conservation system by wireless sensor networks (iPower). This system consists of some WSNs connected to a control server, some power-line control devices, and some user identification devices. A WSN is deployed in each room to monitor the usage of electric appliances and to help the control server to determine if there are electric appliances that can be turned off to reduce unnecessary energy consumption. The iPower system is quite intelligent and can adapt to personal need by automatically adjusting electric appliances to satisfy users’ requirements. The design and implementation details of iPower are reported in this paper.