With the increasing proliferation of LED lighting technologies, intelligent lighting systems have become more and more popular, especially for large indoor spaces. Event hosts now enhance their events with innovative ambient lighting solutions, and in open plan offices, intelligent lighting can contribute to a positive working atmosphere. The control of these new lighting systems is increasingly managed by wireless control systems. However, particularly in large and dense wirelessly controlled LED lighting systems, reliable and smart control of the network is a challenge.

This is where the D³LC (Data Dissemination in Dense Wireless Lighting Control) communication protocol suite comes in. The D³LC suite has been developed by Nimbus Centre researcher Conrad Dandelski as part of his PhD research under the supervision of Dr. Bernd-Ludwig Wenning and Prof. Dirk Pesch in the scope of the project DEWI (www.dewi-project.eu). DEWI is co-funded by the European Commission and Enterprise Ireland under the Artemis Joint Undertaking.

The D³LC suite is an Internet of Things communication protocol suite that is designed to send data with strict Quality of Service constraints. It enables the lighting network to respond to user input in a fast and synchronous manner, so that homogeneous colour and brightness levels are achieved in large lighting networks. With D³LC, the lighting network configuration is self-organizing, generating the most suitable network topology for reliable operation. Target audience for the protocol suite are lighting system manufacturers who can use it as a basis for products aimed at large scale deployments.

Mr. Dandelski’s PhD research is jointly supervised between the Nimbus Centre and Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, with whom the Nimbus Centre has a long-standing research collaboration. Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences have provided the opportunity to present this work at CeBIT as part of their exhibition stand from the 20.03.2017 to 24.03.2017 in Hanover, Germany.