Design and Implementation of an Internet of Things Communications System for Legacy Device Control and Management

Applying the capabilities of the Internet of Things holds particular promise for advancing certain of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For instance, citizens in many developing countries lack access to energy, and suffer from a lack of energy independence, scarcity, and high energy costs. Efforts are underway to make energy generation, transmission, and consumption more efficient via the application of modern communications and control. In this paper we focus on a communications and demand-side control application for legacy appliances. Instead of replacing existing devices with new “smart” devices with better communications capability, we integrate legacy devices into a centralized control system. We designed and implemented a communications system that allows control of infrared-enabled appliances over a network using wired or wireless communications. We designed a web application and user interface that can function remotely over the Internet, and use microcontrollers and infrared transmitters to communicate with infrared-enabled devices. We demonstrate a prototype of the system to control air conditioning units in a commercial building for energy management. The system uses open source hardware, software, and protocols. While we use energy management as an example, we focus on the general communications and control architecture, which is easily scalable and applicable to other devices and applications beyond those demonstrated here.