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IEC publishes Part 104 of IEC 62386; describes alternative transport including wireless

March 20, 2019

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) has issued a pre-release version of Part 104 of IEC 62386, which is widely referred to as the international DALI standard.

Part 104 covers “general requirements for wireless and alternative wired system components.” According to Part 104, the DALI lighting-control protocol is used to communicate between the DALI components in the network. However, the underlying transport protocol is different from the conventional wired DALI bus system that is described in Part 101.

The pre-release version (PRV) of Part 104 can be purchased from the IEC website

DiiA has not decided if and when this part will be included in the DALI-2 certification program.

Part 104 currently includes the choice of one of four different underlying communication protocols, namely:

  • Bluetooth® Mesh
  • VEmesh™
  • Distributed PLC bus (DPB)
  • User datagram protocol (UDP)

Bluetooth Mesh and VEmesh are wireless transport protocols. The latter is a proprietary technology from Virtual Extension (a DiiA member), which is licensed to other companies. DPB is a proprietary version of PLC, or Power Line Communication, which uses the existing supply wiring for the communications signal. UDP is related to Internet Protocol (IP), and can be wired (Ethernet) or wireless (WiFi), among other possibilities.

Today, lighting-control networks have been implemented that utilize wireless links to connect DALI sub-networks or to connect individual fixtures that contain an intra-luminaire DALI bus. In these cases, and unlike the situation specified in Part 104, the wireless links do not use DALI communication, and a gateway is required between the DALI bus and the wireless protocol of choice. Many companies offer proprietary solutions for the wireless links and gateways.

 


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