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I. INTRODUCTION
NTERNET of Things (IoT) [1] is a technology that connects all things and the Internet in smart spaces. By implementations of intelligence with sensing devices, IoT has been
widely applied to different elds, such as smart homes [2], [3].
The application elds in smart homes [4] incorporate smartness into home areas for comfort, safety, security, healthcare,
and energy conservation [5], [6]. The need for comfort and a
convenient life are especially important in smart homes. Thus,
home automation is one of the most essential and critical components for the IoT-based smart home technology. Home automation systems are used to control home devices or appliances
in smart homes and provide automatic remote control inside or
outside homes [7]. Nevertheless, although remote control provides convenience and ease of use, some major problems require
consideration and improvement, such as how to provide an intuitive and user-friendly remote control scheme in IoT-based
smart homes [8].
The goal of this paper is to develop an intelligent universal remote control system for home appliances called Point-n-Press.
Point-n-Press automatically detects the device (or appliance)
when a user points the controller at it. Also, a user interface
(UI) for controlling this device is immediately displayed on the
screen of the controller. Only the functional buttons that are
relevant to the current control context appear on the UI. The
UI provides intuitive operations and user-friendly interfaces,
which enable users to simply enable and control the target device among the increasingly complex functionalities of home
devices in a shared space for IoT-based smart homes. Note that
a nite state machine (FSM) is used to model all operational
states of a device and dependencies among these states. Multiple bit-string formatted control codes (modeled as bit-vector
forms), which represent the control operations, are also applied
in the proposed scheme to decrease the bandwidth consumption.
Two real prototypes are implemented in smart homes to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme. Fig. 1 shows one
of the prototypes for controlling a fan. In this control prototype,
Point-n-Press is implemented in a mobile phone; a fan can be directly controlled by pointing to an external control box near the
fan. Note that two state dependencies are included in the control
process of the fan. First, the fan can only be started by pressing
the Power button when it is powered off, whereas pressing
other buttons is useless. Second, the wind speed button has
no effect on the fan when the fan is in sleep or natural mode,
because the wind speed is automatically adjusted. Thus, by considering the state dependencies, only functional buttons that are
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2
Available: http://www.upnp.org/
2[Online].
Available: http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/incits/v2/
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LEE et al.: POINT-N-PRESS: AN INTELLIGENT UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR HOME APPLIANCES
Fig. 3. Software stacks of (a) the PPRC and (b) the target device.
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B. Primary Workflows
With the G sensor in the PPRC, the system can detect that the
PPRC has been shaken (i.e., preparing to perform some control operations) and may be used for controlling appliances.
The PPRC then sends a Be Ready signal to the PPCB in
the vicinity via a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi wireless network. When
a PPCB receives the Be Ready signal, the PPCB initializes
and enables its internal IR receiver. Once the PPRC is xed on
and pointed to a specic PPCB, the IR receiver of the PPCB
subsequently receives the signal that was transmitted from the
IR transmitter of the PPRC using directionality of the IR characteristic. During this time, the Target Control component of
the PPCB simultaneously transmits the DCP to the URC Control component of the PPRC via a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi wireless
network. After registering the received DCP to the Device Prole Registry component, the URC Control component generates
a control UI via the Interface Generator component according
to the DCP and state dependencies of the FSM. At this point,
the PPRC can issue control commands using the corresponding
control UI via the UPnP Control Point component. The PPRC
then transmits control commands to the UPnP Device component of the PPCB to control the specic target device. Last, the
PPCB transmits the received control commands from the PPRC
to the appliance to generate the corresponding control operations via an IR transmitter. The home appliance performs the
corresponding operations issued by the PPRC.
C. Device Control Profile
A remote controller controls appliances by the transmission
of messages. Fig. 4 shows an example of an XML message [18]
(i.e., the DCP) for a fan with three buttons. Although the XML
message increases the convenience of discovering and controlling appliances, the complicated control formats and sizes consume signicant bandwidth, produce heavy loads and create
bottlenecks in the network transmission.
To solve this problem, the proposed DCP incorporates the
typical feature that each home appliance is sequentially operated (e.g., the power is changed from off to on and then off
again after pressing the power button). Besides, the bit-string
encoding scheme, i.e., modeled as a bit-vector form, is used to
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LEE et al.: POINT-N-PRESS: AN INTELLIGENT UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR HOME APPLIANCES
TABLE I
REPRESENTATION OF FUNCTIONS AND STATES IN BIT-STRING FORMATS FOR CONTROLLING A FAN
Fig. 7. Function buttons and status parameters of a fan as represented in bitvector forms.
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Fig. 9. Smart-home demo room with the proposed lighting control system.
Fig. 11. System operations and UI demonstration for controlling a fan. (a)
Search for appliances (not yet pointing to the PPCB of the fan and nothing is
displayed on the screen). (b) Pointing to the PPCB of the fan (at this point, the
state of the fan is powered off). (c) Pointing to the PPCB of the fan and pressing
the Power button (at this point, the state of the fan is powered on in normal
mode and a moderate wind speed). (d) Pointing to the PPCB of the fan and
pressing the Mode button (at this point, the state of the fan is powered on in
natural mode with no wind speed control available).
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LEE et al.: POINT-N-PRESS: AN INTELLIGENT UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR HOME APPLIANCES
TABLE II
COMPARISON OF BANDWIDTH CONSUMPTION FOR CONTROLLING A FAN
TABLE III
COMPARISON OF BANDWIDTH CONSUMPTION FOR CONTROLLING A LIGHTING
CONTROL SYSTEM
that the fan is powered off, and other operations of the fan are
not allowed), as shown in Fig. 11(b). As the Power button
is pressed, the state displayed on the screen of the PPRC is
switched to power on. The fan is operated in normal mode with a
moderate wind speed, as shown in Fig. 11(c). After the Mode
button is pressed, the fan is operated in natural mode without
wind speed control functions (i.e., the Speed icon and related
options are hidden), as shown in Fig. 11(d).
Fig. 12 shows the demonstrated operations and control UIs of
the proposed lighting control system. As shown in Fig. 12(a), a
smart phone, which is also treated as the PPRC, is picked up and
the Be Ready signal is issued to the PPCB. After the PPRC is
pointed to the PPCB of the lighting control system, the PPRC
receives the DCP from the PPCB via a wireless network. The
icon and its current state of the lighting control system are subsequently displayed on the control screen (at this point, only
the Mode icon and the power off information are displayed,
which indicates that the lighting control system is powered off
and only the Mode icon is available to enable the lighting control system), as shown in Fig. 12(b). After the Mode button
is pressed by a user, the state displayed on the screen of the
PPRC is changed to the power on state, as shown in Fig. 12(c).
The lighting control system is operated in scenario mode (i.e.,
its default mode after power on) without single lighting control
functions (i.e., the Single icon and related options are hidden).
After the Mode button is pressed again, the state is operated in
single lighting control mode without scenario control functions
(i.e., the Scenario icon and related options cannot be operated), as shown in Fig. 12(d).
C. Bandwidth Consumption Comparisons
Here, two previous remote control approachesa RF4CEbased approach [14] and an XML-based approach [18]are applied for the comparison with the proposed Point-n-Press. Controlling the same fan with IR capability and three buttons, as
shown in Fig. 1, the comparisons of bandwidth consumption
are summarized in Table II. The comparison of the bandwidth
consumption for controlling a lighting control system among
the proposed Point-n-Press, the RF4CE-based, and the conventional XML approaches is also shown in Table III.
As shown in Fig. 4, the DCP le size for a fan in the previous
XML approach is 885 bytes. For the RF4CE-based approach,
which is based on the denition of the consumer electronics
remote control (CERC) frame, the consumer electronics control
(CEC) frame, and the state transmission functions, the size of
the DCP is 288 bytes for a fan with six state machines. Note
that each state machine uses 48 bytes, which refers to the design
of a previous study [14]. Conversely, the le size of the DCP
of the proposed Point-n-Press is only 242 bytes, as illustrated
in Fig. 5. Thus, the bandwidth consumption of the proposed
Point-n-Press while transmitting the DCP for the rst time is
more efcient compared with the bandwidth consumption in the
previous two studies. When a user begins to control the fan, the
command set of the previous XML-based study uses numeric
values as transmission messages, such as 01. Therefore, the
size of the command set of the conventional XML approach is
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Fig. 13. Examples of conventional XML state return messages for a fan. (a)
Minimum state return message. (b) Maximum state return message.
three bytes. However, the size of the state return message ranges
from a minimum of 213 bytes to a maximum of 378 bytes, as
shown in Fig. 13.
For the RF4CE-based approach, the size of the command set
is always two bytes using an efcient transmit protocol and a
FSM control scheme. The size of the state return message ranges
from a minimum of 182 bytes to a maximum of 332 bytes because the CEC frame format contains a maximum of 16 data
blocks, in which the size of each data block is ten bytes. Note
that only 1 data block is included in the minimum state return
message and the maximum state return message consists of 15
data blocks.
For Point-n-Press, with the designs of the FSM and bit-string
formatted control codes, both the sizes of the command set and
the state return message are always two bytes for all operations
of the fan. The bandwidth consumption of Point-n-Press is signicantly less than the sizes of the data transmission in the previous two studies in Table II. The bandwidth consumption of
Point-n-Press is superior to the bandwidth consumption in previous studies to obtain the return state of the appliances due to
the use of the hexadecimal string (e.g., 0 01) is used.
For the lighting control system, the comparisons between
Point-n-Press and the conventional approaches are shown in
Table III. For the proposed Point-n-Press, the le size of the
DCP for controlling a lighting control system is only 688 bytes
with 36 state machines. Conversely, both the sizes of the command set and the state return message are always two bytes
for all operations of the fan with the designs of the FSM and
bit-string formatted control codes. The le size of the DCP is
2,930 bytes with 36 types of control states for the conventional
XML approach. In addition, the size of the state return message
for the conventional XML approach ranges from a minimum
of 598 bytes to a maximum of 1,560 bytes, and the size of the
command set is three bytes due to the numeric values. Both the
sizes of the DCP and the state return message are larger than the
proposed Point-n-Press.
For the RF4CE-based approach, the le size of the DCP is
816 bytes for a lighting control system with 17 state machines
based on the denition of the CERC, the CEC frame, and the
state transmission functions. The size of the command set is always two bytes when an efcient transmission protocol and a
FSM control scheme are employed. The size of the state return
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LEE et al.: POINT-N-PRESS: AN INTELLIGENT UNIVERSAL REMOTE CONTROL SYSTEM FOR HOME APPLIANCES
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