Abstract:  

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become more integrated into our daily lives in various fields such as health, energy management systems, and safety applications. The use of WSNs in home environment applications is increasing rapidly. Smart homes implement home area network (HAN) for many different applications including smart grids. In-home energy management (iHEM) has been proposed in the literature to decrease energy expenses. In this paper, we propose to shift the consumers? demands to off-peak and mid-peak periods based on the device/appliance priority. In our system we use three levels of appliance priorities; high priority, medium priority and low priority. We discuss using iHEM with different delays, and also augment iHEM with priority scheme and iHEM with different delays scheme to get better results. We simulate our work and compared it with the previous techniques using our discrete event simulator implemented in C++. The main performance measure used to compare our work with the traditional iHEM scheme is the total savings in the cost of energy consumption in dollars. The results show that our proposed modifications over iHEM resulted in saving that ranges from around $15 to $30 during the six month period of the simulation.