Synchrones Steuern von Aktoren in einem drahtlosen Netzwerk mit Mesh-Topologie

Abstract

Smart home systems are becoming increasingly more popular and place special demands on the underlying technology. A particularly critical aspect is the simultaneous control of multiple actuators. In the existing Loxone Air mesh network, the use of unicast transmissions leads to significant delays between devices that are triggered at the same time. The aim of this thesis was to develop a concept for the synchronous control of multiple actuators in the Loxone Air mesh network and to evaluate its effectiveness. For this purpose, the existing communication stack was extended. With the use of IPv6 multicast addresses, messages can be distributed to defined groups of devices. In addition, a synchronization layer was implemented, based on the Glossy approach with embedded payload, enabling temporally coordinated execution of actions. The implementation and evaluation were carried out in a test setup with real Loxone Air devices. Unicast, broadcast, and multicast transmissions were compared. The results show that synchronized multicast significantly reduced switching time differences. An improvement of about 90% was achieved. While unicast transmissions showed differences of 120–370 ms, synchronized multicasts reduced these values to 8.5–38.5 ms. This work demonstrates that synchronized multicast transmissions provide an efficient solution for the simultaneous control of multiple actuators. However, it also shows existing limitations regarding missing acknowledgment mechanisms and system-related latencies. Therefore, further optimizations are required for integration into real products.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	German (Austria)
Supervisor	Josef Langer (Supervisor)