Smart GSM Based Home Automation System

Rozita Teymourzadeh, CEng, Member IEEE/IET, Salah Addin Ahmed, Kok Wai Chan, and Mok Vee Hoong
Faculty of Engineering, Technology & Built Environment
UCSI University
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
rozita@ucsiuniversity.edu.my

Abstract — This research work investigates the potential of system for home appliances. However, a few limitations for
‘Full Home Control’, which is the aim of the Home Automation the system include not being able to control multiple
Systems in near future. The analysis and implementation of the appliances concurrently and the home automations system
home automation technology using Global System for Mobile could not verify the status of the appliances. ElKamchouchi
Communication (GSM) modem to control home appliances such
and ElShafee [6] presented the design and prototype
as light, conditional system, and security system via Short
Message Service (SMS) text messages is presented in this paper. implementation of basic home automation system based on
The proposed research work is focused on functionality of the SMS technology using AT89C55 Atmel microcontroller. The
GSM protocol, which allows the user to control the target system microcontroller acts as the bridge between the GSM network
away from residential using the frequency bandwidths. The and sensors of the home automation system. Further
concept of serial communication and AT-commands has been researches have been conducted to analyze the performance of
applied towards development of the smart GSM-based home other home automation control system [14-16]. Internet and
automation system. Home owners will be able to receive feedback wireless communications have also been utilized in parallel
status of any home appliances under control whether switched on with GSM for home automations [17].
or off remotely from their mobile phones. PIC16F887
Among the cellular technologies, GSM network is
microcontroller with the integration of GSM provides the smart
automated house system with the desired baud rate of 9600 bps.
preferred for the communication between the home appliances
The proposed prototype of GSM based home automation system and the user due to its wide spread coverage [8,9] which makes
was implemented and tested with maximum of four loads and the whole system online for almost all the time. Another
shows the accuracy of ≥98%. advantage of using the GSM network in home automation is its
high security infrastructure, which provides maximum
Keywords — Home automation; Global System for Mobile reliability whereby other people cannot monitor the
Communication (GSM); Short Message Service (SMS); PIC information sent or received. Hence, this research work
microcontroller; RS232 standard implements SMS based control for home appliances using the
GSM architecture without accessing the local network.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, there has been a growing interest among II. SYSTEM REALIZATION
consumers in the smart home concept [1]. Smart homes The design of our proposed smart GSM-based home
contain multiple, connected devices such as home automation system is given in Fig. 1. The architecture consists
entertainment consoles, security systems, lighting, access of mobile phone and GSM modem. In the proposed system
control systems and surveillance. Intelligent home automation design, incoming SMS message is sent from the user phone to
system is incorporated into smart homes to provide comfort, the GSM modem as a text message via cellular network. The
convenience, and security to home owners [2-4]. Home GSM modem then sends the commands in text mode to the
automation system represents and reports the status of the PIC microcontroller using an RS232 interface. The RS232
connected devices in an intuitive, user-friendly interface voltage levels are at ±12V whereas both the microcontroller
allowing the user to interact and control various devices with input and output operates at 0V to +5V. Since RS232 is not
the touch of a few buttons. Some of the major communication compatible with microcontroller, MAX232 is utilized to
technologies used by today’s home automation system [5-7] enable the communication between both the GSM modem and
include Bluetooth, WiMAX and Wireless LAN (Wi-Fi), PIC microcontroller by converting RS232 level signals to TTL
Zigbee, and Global System for Mobile Communication level signal. Outgoing message from the system containing the
(GSM). home appliances status is delivered to the mobile phone
All GSM is one of the most widely used cellular through GSM modem.
technologies in the world [8,9]. With the increase in the
number of GSM subscribers, research and development [10-
12] is heavily supported in further investigating the GSM
implementation. In 2009, Das, Sanaullah, et. al. [13]
developed a cell phone based remote management and control
 Fig. 1. Stage Realization.

The 8-bit PIC16F887 microcontroller generally consists of Fig. 2. Simulation of the proposed GSM based home automation system.
timers, Analog to Digital Converters (ADCs), and Universal
Synchronous Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (USART). III. IMPLEMENTATION
In the proposed research work, the microcontroller receives As shown in Fig. 3, waveform is generated in the digital
instructions and decodes them to give device address and oscilloscope when the command is transmitted from
command, then sends corresponding signals to the driver of PIC16F887 to GSM modem. This command will execute the
the power circuit. In addition, the microcontroller ensures dual deletion of the first message from the SIM card memory. The
independent operation action to turn on the device or switch it program reaches to a sleep state waiting for the new incoming
off. A feedback status of any devices under control whether text messages and then compares the text message with the
switched on or off will be provided by the microcontroller. stored commands. If both the received text message and the
The RS-232 interface standard defines the electrical and stored commands match, then, it will execute the intended
mechanical details of the interface between Data Terminal command, which is turning on or off the output terminal.
Equipment (DTE) and Data Communications Equipment
(DCE), which employ serial binary data interchange. The
current version of the standard refers to DCE as Data Circuit
terminating Equipment. Physically, interfacing between the
PIC16F887 and GSM modem was implemented using RS232
standard installed on Max232.
Since the system design has not included a battery, an
external power supply is connected to the system to drive
sufficient amount of current through the circuit connections.
Relays had been connected to the output loads for a stable
electrical control because these relays can provide feeding for
different voltage level loads. Hence, the output selection
becomes easier at any voltage. Fig. 3. AT+CMGD=1 command to delete SMS message.
Fig. 2 demonstrates the simulation of the proposed GSM A simulation result was performed to observe the response
based home automation system being implemented in several while communicating with the GSM modem. The AT
stages. The PIC16F887 was simulated with the GSM modem command was sent from PIC16F887 to the GSM modem as the
by connecting it to the physical ports on the PC. MAX232 was program starts up, then the response is received from the GSM
placed to ensure proper transmission of data between the two modem after very short period of time that does not exceed 500
terminals. Virtual terminal monitors the text sent from, and to microseconds which is fast enough to detect the incoming
the PIC16F887 while checking the transmission process and message from the modem. The display was used to show when
testing the algorithm. The waveform of the transmitted and the PIC is transmitting the signal.
received messages is monitored from the oscilloscope. While From Fig. 4, the PIC16F887 serves as a transmitter initially
simulating the GSM modem, the “COMPIM” clock physically and then, it receives the response from modem. The duration
tests the response of the GSM modem by connecting it to a between the text sent and response received is less than 500
physical port on PC. microseconds. Hence, the delay time is ignored because the
data sent are limited to certain commands that do not exceed 4
or 5 characters. However, if the amount of data transferred is
very huge, the response delay time is very critical and must be
studied and analyzed in detail. Furthermore, the delay that must
be controlled for this project is for GSM communication that is
mostly governed by the SMS protocol and does not exceed 2 or
3 seconds as had been tested practically.
 Fig. 4. Waveform of transceiver text message.

A layout is designed using Proteus ISIS Professional,

while adding Virtual Terminal and connecting it to COMPIM, Fig. 6. All loads switched on when text commands sent via SMS.
which is physically the DB9 connector in the PC terminal. It IV. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
can be added from the library as shown in Fig. 5. The message
alert text indicates that the message has been successfully The Baud Rate Generator (BRG) is an 8-bit or 16-bit timer
received and stored in the SIM card in the memory location. that is dedicated to the support of both asynchronous and
synchronous EUSART operation. By default, the BRG
operates in 8-bit mode. For the PIC16F887 with frequency of
oscillator (FOSC) of 20MHz, desired baud rate of 9600 bps,
asynchronous mode, and 8-bit BRG, (1) will yield a baud rate
of 9470 bps and an error of -1.35% illustrated in Fig. 7.
FOSC
Calculated Baud Rate = (1)
64([SPBRGH : SPBRG]+1)

Fig. 5. Detection of incoming SMS from GSM modem.

Fig. 7. Baud rate specification.
The oscilloscope is connected to the receiver side (RX) on
PIC16F887 microcontroller that is connected to GSM modem The prototype of the proposed GSM based home
to display the waveform of the detected message as soon as it automation system is shown in Fig. 8. A 12V is supplied to the
reaches the GSM memory. After detecting the message, the voltage regulator to power the circuit. MAX232 is connected
PIC16F887 is supposed to read and decode the incoming to the GSM modem and the system run smoothly after the text
message to execute the intended command, which is turning on message was received. The output loads were activated and
the loads. The whole process is being executed within short automated the house in desirable basis.
period of time that does not exceed 2 seconds. Fig. 6 shows the
command text message had been sent to activate connected
loads at the same time.
After receiving the command to turn on the lights, the
relay set will perform switching operation from normally
opened to close the circuit, allowing the current to start
lighting as illustrated in Fig. 6.
 [6] H. ElKamchouchi and A. ElShafee, “Design and prototype
implementation of SMS based home automation system”, in
Proc. 2012 IEEE International Conference on Electronics
Design, Systems and Applications (ICEDSA), Kuala Lumpur,
pp.162-167.
[7] M. S. Khandare and A. Mahajan, “Mobile Monitoring System
for Smart Home,” in Proc. 2010 3rd International Conference
on Emerging Trends in Engineering and Technology (ICETET),
Goa, pp.848 – 852.
[8] G. Gu and G. Peng, “The survey of GSM wireless
communication system,” in Proc. 2010 International
Conference on Computer and Information Application (ICCIA),
Tianjin, pp.121 – 124.
[9] G. Mingming, Shaoliangshan, Huixiaowei, and Sunqingwei,
“The System of Wireless Smart House Based on GSM and
ZigBee,” in Proc. 2010 International Conference on Intelligent
Computation Technology and Automation (ICICTA), Changsha,
pp.1017 – 1020.
Fig. 8. Prototype of proposed GSM based home automation system.
[10] C. Felix and I. J. Raglend, “Home automation using GSM,” in
V. CONCLUSION Proc. 2011 International Conference on Signal Processing,
Communication, Computing and Networking Technologies
Recently, the home automation market is very promising (ICSCCN), Thuckafay, pp.15-19.
field that is growing very fast and needs vast range of [11] C. Peijiang and J. Xuehua, “Design and Implementation of
developments that can be carried out in the concept of smart Remote Monitoring System Based on GSM,” in Proc. 2008
home. In this project design and implementation of smart Pacific-Asia Workshop on Computational Intelligence and
GSM house was considered. PIC16F887 microcontroller with Industrial Application (PACIIA '08), Wuhan, pp.678 – 681.
the cooperation of GSM provides the smart automated house [12] B. S. Rao, S. D. V. Prasad, and R.M. Mohan, “A prototype for
system with the desired baud rate of 9600 bps. The proposed Home Automation using GSM technology,” in Proc. 2010
prototype was implemented and tested with maximum of four International Conference on Power, Control and Embedded
loads and shows the accuracy of ≥98%. Systems (ICPCES), Allahabad, pp.1-4.
[13] C. K. Das, M. Sanaullah, H. M. G. Sarower, and M. M. Hassan,
REFERENCES
(2009). Development of a Cell Phone based Remote Control
[1] B. I. Ahmad, F. Yakubu, M. A. Bagiwa, and U. I. Abdullahi. System: an Effective Switching System for Controlling Home
(2011). Remote Home Management: An alternative for and Office Appliances. International Journal of Electrical &
working at home while away. World of Computer Science and Computer Sciences, 9(10), pp.23-29.
Information Technology Journal (WCSIT), 1(4), pp. 144-147.
[14] K. Gill, S. -H. Yang, F. Yao, and X. Lu. (2009). A zigbee-
[2] A. W. Ahmad, N. Jan, S. Iqbal, and C. Lee, “Implementation of based home automation system. IEEE Transactions on
ZigBee-GSM based Home Security Monitoring and Remote Consumer Electronics, 55(2), pp.422 – 430.
Control system,” in Proc. 2011 IEEE 54th International
[15] L. Pu, “An Improved Short Message Security Protocol for
Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS),
Home Network,” in Proc. 2009 International Conference on
Seoul, pp.1-4.
Future Computer and Communication (FCC '09), Wuhan,
[3] T. Begum, M. S. Hossain, M. B. Uddin, and M. S. H. pp.62–65.
Chowdhury, “Design and development of activation and
[16] T. Perumal, M. N. Sulaiman, Khaironi Yatim Sharif, A. R.
monitoring of home automation system via SMS through
Ramli, and C. Y. Leong. (2013). Development of an Embedded
microcontroller,” in Proc. 2009 4th International Conference
Smart Home Management Scheme. International Journal of
on Computers and Devices for Communication (CODEC
Smart Home, 7(2), pp.15 – 26.
2009), Kolkata, pp.1-3.
[17] L. Wei, Y. Min, C. LiangLiang, and C. Ping, “The Design of
[4] Y. Zhai and X. Cheng, “Design of smart home remote
Intelligent Household Control System Based on Internet and
monitoring system based on embedded system,” in Proc. 2011
GSM,” in Proc. 2011 Second International Conference on
2nd International Conference on Computing, Control and
Networking and Distributed Computing (ICNDC), Beijing,
Industrial Engineering (CCIE), Wuhan, pp.41 – 44.
pp.254–256.
[5] S. I. Azid and S. Kumar. (2011). Analysis and Performance of a
Low Cost SMS Based Home Security System. International
Journal of Smart Home, 5(3), pp.15-24.