Bandwidth issues in IP based lighting controls

Abstract

The task to switch on 100 lights together seems rather easy, but it gets rather difficult when using established TCP/IP transport through bandwidth-restricted controls-RF connections: A convenient “time-to-light” after pushing a button should stay below 0.2 seconds. Without any optimization, the control may easily take more than 10 seconds before the action is completed. This paper addresses the timing issues created by limited available bandwidth, and proposes a set of measures to ensure useful performance when creating Internet based lighting controls on low bandwidth RF links. It is shown how the use of UDP, IPv6 multicast, distributed scene handling and specific acknowledgement procedures achieves decent lighting controls performance also on IP based RF links.