Subglobal area addressing for electronic price displays

摘要

An electronic price display system has uniquely addressed electronic shelf labels (ESLs) controlled by a central computer or host. To save power and communications channel bandwidth, subglobal addressing is defined which permits the central computer to address more than one but less than all of the labels. In one application of the addressing protocol the central computer causes the subglobally addressed labels to perform some common action such as changing a display to an alternative display. In another application of the addressing protocol the central computer uses the subglobal addressing to disambiguate when data collisions occur due to more than one label attempting to respond to a global query.