A ZigBee-Based Power Monitoring System with Direct Load Control Capabilities

ZigBee is a wireless networking standard that has characteristics of low power consumption, having up to 65535 device nodes, and low data rates. It is suitable to be applied in many home and industrial applications that could operate in harsh radio environments and in isolated locations. In this paper, a novel ZigBee-based powering monitoring system (PMS) is proposed. In particular, the proposed PMS utilizes ZigBee for wireless communication, DSP (Digital Signal Processing) for realtime power parameters computation, and Web Services for constructing the communication infrastructure among distributed systems across networks. A paradigm system for monitoring campus power consumptions is constructed and experimented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed PMS. The testing results show that the functions of the proposed PMS comply with the designed objectives. The paradigm PMS also demonstrates good performances in direct load control and warning message transmission. This work possesses novelty for first time integrating ZigBee, DSP, and Web Services technologies to develop PMS, and can be a useful reference for future developments of PMS.