Researching the BLE based intelligent lighting control system

Abstract

Several leading lighting companies for example NXP and Philips work in a project to explore the next generation intelligent lighting system. One innovation of the project is using a distributed architecture to replace current centralized system to increase robustness and extensibility. As a core component of wireless lighting control system, there are many wireless communication protocols can be applied in distributed system. We choose BLE protocol which is a new wireless communication protocol as the communication protocol of distributed system to do research because BLE has a huge potential in low power consumption. However, there exist some problems in BLE based distributed lighting control system. One of these problems is a commissioning problem. The commissioning problem we come up with is that a constrained device (no screen) router, cannot display a scanning list of BLE based lamps. This prevents specific BLE based lamps which user want to remotely control, from securely joining in the existing access point (router). The main purpose of this thesis is to solve the commissioning problem in a BLE based intelligent lighting control system to make BLE become an appropriate candidate in this field. An innovative solution, developed on standardized BLE protocol, which is used for overcoming the commissioning problem through utilizing modified BLE protocol in a smartphone. The modified BLE protocol is a application protocol. With the modified BLE protocol stack, a third device which is a Commissioning Tool(smartphone) can securely instruct specific BLE based lamps to router. As part of this thesis, a demo was set up and the solution to the commissioning problem has been tested on this system. Results proved that the solution was valid to solve the commissioning problem of BLE based intelligent lighting control system.