Visible Light Communication Method for Personalized and Localized Building Energy Management

• Published in: ETRI journal Vol. 38; no. 4; pp. 735 - 745
• Main Authors: Jeong, Jin‐Doo, Lim, Sang‐Kyu, Han, Jinsoo, Park, Wan‐Ki, Lee, Il‐Woo, Chong, Jong‐Wha
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) 01.08.2016; 한국전자통신연구원
• Subjects: Building Energy Management; Dimming; LED; Localization; Personalization; Security; VLC; VPPM; 전자/정보통신공학
• ISSN: 1225-6463; 2233-7326
• DOI: 10.4218/etrij.16.0116.0120

The Paris agreement at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) emphasizes the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and increase in energy consumption in all areas. Thus, an important aspect is energy saving in buildings where the lighting is a major component of the electrical energy consumption. This paper proposes a building energy management system employing visible light communication (VLC) based on LED lighting. The proposed management system has key characteristics including personalization and localization by utilizing such VLC advantages as secure communication through light and location‐information transmission. Considering the efficient implementation of an energy‐consumption adjustment using LED luminaires, this paper adopts variable pulse position modulation (VPPM) as a VLC modulation scheme with simple controllability of the dimming level that is capable of providing a full dimming range. This paper analyzes the VPPM performances according to variable dimming for several schemes, and proposes a VPPM demodulation architecture based on dimming‐factor acquisition, which can obtain an improved performance compared to a 2PPM‐based scheme. In addition, the effect of a dimming‐factor acquisition error is analyzed, and a frame format for minimizing this error effect is proposed.