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Internet of Things for Buildings Monitoring: Experiences and Challenges
Abstract
In recent years, smart buildings have proliferated around the world, offering new solutions to the problems of smart living. This paper describes the authors experience and lessons learned in deploying Internet of Things (IoT) for smart building monitoring and management. It addresses critical implementation issues related to the communication architecture to build reliable and versatile system to monitor small and medium sized building. The paper explains how to create services on top of the data gathering architecture. It then focuses on the deployment approach and gives the results from the test site.
... T HE Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept used to connect objects to the Internet, enabling billions of tiny devices, from smart-enabled devices to sensors for climate and agriculture monitoring, to cooperate and communicate with each other while performing different application tasks such as sensing (e.g., temperature and humidity), processing and transmitting data [1]. Due to the low price and maintenance, as well as easy usage, these devices are involved in a wide range of IoT applications, such as wildlife tracking, healthcare [2] [3], autonomous vehicles [4] or building monitoring [5] [6]. Typically, most IoT devices consist of a microcontroller (MCU), a radio chip (i.e., low power radio technologies), sensors and actuators to interact with the environment, and a battery that acts as a main power source [1] [7]. ...
Tiny battery-less Internet of Things (IoT) devices that depend on the harvested energy from their environment provide a promising alternative for a sustainable IoT vision. These devices use small capacitors as energy storage, which together with the unpredictable and dynamic harvesting environment results in intermittent on-off behavior of the device. The crucial issue to effectively use battery-less IoT devices is to find a way of enabling the successful execution of application tasks in face of this intermittency. As the conventional computing models cannot handle this behavior, in this paper we present an energy-aware task scheduler for battery-less IoT devices based on dependencies and priorities, which can intelligently schedule the application tasks avoiding power failures and maintaining forward progress. With the properly defined voltage thresholds for each application task, using our energy-aware task scheduler a safer execution can be ensured. We evaluate our approach based on emulated and real experiments and validate it using two types of power management units (Environment Emulator and Intelligent Power Management Unit based on the AEM10941 chip). Our results show that the energy-aware task scheduler is able to react and adapt the execution to environmental changes, avoiding power failures. Comparing to the state of the art scheduling approaches, which are mostly not aware of the energy, we show that our energy-aware task scheduler can keep the device on during the full time of the experiment, executing more tasks when a relatively small capacitor of 10mF or less is used at harvesting currents as low as 40µA.
... In future work, we intend to address the problem of offloading to air and ground devices, e.g., Internet of Thing (IoT)-enabled spaces [35] or city infrastructure [36]. Another avenue of research is to investigate the security of the UAV network especially in regards to authentication. ...
One of the most promising use cases of 5G/IMT2020 is the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Due to their small size, the UAVs are resource constraint devices. To this end, this paper proposes an offloading algorithm for UAVs to assist in the execution of computationally intensive tasks. The proposed algorithm provides two UAV offloading methods. The first offloading method is the air-offloading, where a UAV can offload its computing tasks to nearby UAVs that have available computing and energy resources. The second offloading method is the ground-offloading, which enables the offloading of tasks to an edge cloud server from the multi-level edge cloud units connected to ground stations. The proposed algorithm is energy-and latency-aware, i.e., it selects the execution device and the offloading method based on the latency and energy constraints. The intensive algorithm simulation over reliable conditions for various scenarios with different cases for each scenario is conducted and results are presented. INDEX TERMS UAV, offloading, latency, energy, 5G, MEC.
... WSN innovations promise to integrate and optimise smart buildings, autonomous vehicles, power grids, etc., to enable a successful transition towards smart, user-driven and demand-focused city infrastructures and services [1,2]. There is a wide range of current smart cities applications, which make our lives easier and more efficient, e.g., a smart phone application that let users find free parking spaces in the centre of town. ...
ISBN 978-3-03842-873-2 (Pbk) ISBN 978-3-03842-874-9 (PDF) https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-03842-874-9 (registering DOI) Open Access
© 2018 MDPI; under CC BY-NC-ND license
Sensors and Actuators in Smart Cities
Mohammad Hammoudeh and Mounir Arioua (Eds.)
Pages: VI, 186
Published: May 2018
(This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Sensors and Actuators in Smart Cities that was published in JSAN)
... Especially interesting are wireless sensor networks for easy deployment and extensions of BEMS for building retrofitting in outdated buildings [14]. However, this introduces additional problems such as vulnerabil-ity to unauthorized network access or complexity of setting up wireless links [15]. Several production scale commercial platforms for IoT and data analytics are available that have a potential to deal with these issues [16] [17] [18]. ...
... Nowadays, IoT applications are widely used in different fields such as smart cities, e-health, intelligent transport systems, to name a few [1]- [3]. Due to their limited storage and computation capacities, IoT devices are usually assisted with cloud services to store and process generated data [4], [5] IoT devices produce huge amounts of data which need to be securely collected and shared among different users [6], [7]. ...
Cloud-assisted IoT applications are gaining an expanding interest, such that IoT devices are deployed in different distributed environments to collect and outsource sensed data to remote servers for further processing and sharing among users. On the one hand, in several applications, collected data are extremely sensitive and need to be protected before out-sourcing. Generally, encryption techniques are applied at the data producer side to protect data from adversaries as well as curious cloud provider. On the other hand, sharing data among users requires fine grained access control mechanisms. To ensure both requirements, Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) has been widely applied to ensure encrypted access control to outsourced data. Although, ABE ensures fine grained access control and data confidentiality, updates of used access policies after encryption and outsourcing of data remains an open challenge. In this paper, we design PU-ABE, a new variant of key policy attribute based encryption supporting efficient access policy update that captures attributes addition to access policies. PU-ABE contributions are multifold. First, access policies involved in the encryption can be updated without requiring sharing secret keys between the cloud server and the data owners neither re-encrypting data. Second, PU-ABE ensures privacy preserving and fine grained access control to outsourced data. Third, ciphertexts received by the end-user are constant sized and independent from the number of attributes used in the access policy which affords low communication and storage costs.
... The Internet of Things (IoT) architecture is gaining more interest as an enabling technology for several applications such as smart cities, smart health care and remote monitoring [1], [2]. IoT systems connect loosely defined objects, gateways and services that may exchange data about peoples' body state, life events, habits, location or professional information. ...
In this paper, we present C-ABSC, a cooperative privacy preserving attribute based signcryption mechanism. It consists on performing the combined signing and encrypting processes of a set of data devices' inputs in a secure collaborative manner. The main idea behind C-ABSC relies on the distribution of the signcrypting operation among different devices, with respect to selected subsets of a general access predicate, such as an untrusted aggregating entity is capable of decrypting the received aggregated data only if a sufficient number of IoT devices cooperates. The C-ABSC scheme is multifold. First, it provides a selective access to authenticated aggregated data contents. Second, it provides a privacy preserving signcrypting process, such that a curious aggregator can neither infer the used IoT device's attributes for signing nor deciphering single data chunks. Third, C-ABSC relies on low computation and communication processes, mainly for resource-constrained devices.
... Nowadays, IoT applications are widely used in different fields such as smart cities, e-health, intelligent transport systems, to name a few (Farhan et al., 2018;Atwady and Hammoudeh, 2017;Coates et al., 2017;Belguith et al., 2018). Due to their limited storage and computation capacities, IoT devices are usually assisted with cloud services to store and process generated data (Kaaniche and Laurent, 2017b;Belguith et al., 2015). ...
Cloud-assisted IoT applications are gaining an expanding interest, such that IoT devices are deployed in different distributed environments to collect and outsource sensed data to remote servers for further processing and sharing among users. On the one hand, in several applications, collected data are extremely sensitive and need to be protected before outsourcing. Generally, encryption techniques are applied at the data producer side to protect data from adversaries as well as curious cloud provider. On the other hand, sharing data among users requires fine grained access control mechanisms. To ensure both requirements, Attribute Based Encryp-tion (ABE) has been widely applied to ensure encrypted access control to outsourced data. Although, ABE ensures fine grained access control and data confidentiality, updates of used access policies after encryption and outsourcing of data remains an open challenge. In this paper, we design PU-ABE, a new variant of key policy attribute based encryption supporting efficient access policy update that captures attributes addition and revocation to access policies. PU-ABE contributions are multifold. First, access policies involved in the encryption can be updated without requiring sharing secret keys between the cloud server and the data owners neither re-encrypting data. Second, PU-ABE ensures privacy preserving and fine grained access control to outsourced data. Third, ciphertexts received by the end-user are constant sized and independent from the number of attributes used in the access policy which affords low communication and storage costs.
... The Internet of Things (IoT) applications are deployed in several fields such as health care, smart cities, smart monitoring [1,5]. IoT systems connect loosely defined objects, gateways and services that may exchange data about peoples' body state, life events, habits, location or professional information. ...
The deployment of IoT devices is gaining an expanding interest in our daily life. Indeed, IoT networks consist in interconnecting several smart and resource constrained devices to enable advanced services. Security management in IoT is a big challenge as personal data are shared by a huge number of distributed services and devices. In this paper, we propose a Cooperative Data Aggregation solution based on a novel use of Attribute Based signcryption scheme (Coop-DAAB). Coop-DAAB consists in distributing data signcryption operation between different participating entities (i.e., IoT devices). Indeed, each IoT device encrypts and signs in only one step the collected data with respect to a selected sub-predicate of a general access predicate before forwarding to an aggregating entity. This latter is able to aggregate and decrypt collected data if a sufficient number of IoT devices cooperates without learning any personal information about each participating device. Thanks to the use of an attribute based signcryption scheme, authenticity of data collected by IoT devices is proved while protecting them from any unauthorized access.
... It can be identified at every step, whether in home or industry. Using IoT capabilities provides open doors to a new world where many things can be addressed much more efficiently and easily, such as automating the processes that take place when a defined event occurs (Coates, Hammoudeh and Holmes, 2017). Even though many devices have the ability to connect to the network, they cannot be interconnected or managed remotely. ...
The concept of the Internet of Things is becoming more and more present today. Every day there will be more devices that could be included in the Internet of Things, whether it is a smart home device or workstation. It is a platform that connects different types of objects and provides them mutual communication. This means that different objects are interconnected with the ability to communicate, allowing users to manage and control them more effectively. Our aim is to conceive and approach IoT in terms of sensor networks and intelligent devices. Intelligent devices in the form of wristbands or watches contain different sensors that can be used to obtain data such as heart rate, blood pressure or body temperature. In this article, wireless sensor networks will be discussed which measure pulse and body temperature. Focus will be on hardware solutions for devices that allow the collection of selected data, specifically devices that could be included in future research. Similar researches will be included and tests that have been carried out in the past. The result of the article will be a summary of available tests with comparing them to each other, to design own solution in the future.
... However, a lot of problems regarding the integration of advanced control mechanisms to building automation systems still remain to be solved and studied [18]. Field test experiences show that the development of IoT devices is a major challenge that needs to be addressed by the whole industry to create common standards and provide interoperability and scalability [19]. Moreover, another major concern the security and privacy of the data, as well as the secure connection between all these devices [20,21]. ...
THe energy-efficient operation of microgrids—a localized grouping of consuming loads (domestic appliances, EVs, etc.) with distributed energy sources such as solar photovoltaic panels—suggests the deployment of Energy Management Systems (EMSs) that enable the actuation of controllable microgrid loads coupled with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. Such tools are capable of optimizing the aggregated performance of the microgrid in an automated manner, based on an extensive network of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI). Modular adaptable/dynamic building envelope (ADBE) solutions have been proven an effective solution—exploiting free façade areas instead of roof areas—for extending the thermal inertia and energy harvesting capacity in existing buildings of different nature (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.). This study presents the PLUG-N-HARVEST holistic workflow towards the delivery of an automatically controllable microgrid integrating active ADBE technologies (e.g., PVs, HVACs). The digital platform comprises cloud AI services and functionalities for energy-efficient management, data healing/cleansing, flexibility forecasting, and the security-by-design IoT to efficiently optimize the overall performance in near-zero energy buildings and microgrids. The current study presents the effective design and necessary digital integration steps towards the PLUG-N-HARVEST ICT platform alongside real-life verification test results, validating the performance of the platform.
... Further, the technical challenges such as lack of reliability, standardization and cloud integration were discussed. Coates et al. [4] presented the challenges in monitoring buildings using IoT. Li et al. [5] studied the role of IoT for creating energy awareness among residents in smart buildings. ...
Scalability of control algorithms used for savings energy in commercial building Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) system and their implementation on low cost resource constrained hardware is a challenging problem. This paper presents the Internet of Things (IoT) prototype which implements a smart and scalable control approach called the Smart-Token Based Scheduling Algorithm (Smart-TBSA) to minimize energy in commercial building HVAC systems. The IoT prototype is formalized with an architecture that encapsulates the different components (hardware, software, networking, and their integration) along with their interactions. A detailed description of the different components, hardware design, deployment issues, and their integration with legacy systems as well as cloud-connectivity is presented. In addition, simple modifications required for transforming the optimization models to an active control technique is also presented. While scalability is provided by the decentralized control, recursive zone thermal model identification, prediction occupant’s thermal sensation, and embedding them within the optimization models enhances the smartness. Consequently, due to the implementation of Smart-TBSA using IoT devices, an otherwise centralized control architecture of the legacy building automation system is transformed to a more scalable and smart decentralized one. The proposed Smart-TBSA and IoT prototype are illustrated on a pilot building in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore having 85 zones. Our results shows that by combining IoT with decentralized control, energy savings up to 20% can be derived. Moreover, we show that legacy building automation system can be transformed into a more smart, adaptable, scalable, and decentralized control by deploying IoT devices without incurring significant costs.
... Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) as a prominent technology is transferring conventional building energy management systems (BEMS) into smart, scalable, efficient, secure, flexible, and real-time systems for easier and greater energy-savings in both residential [27][28][29][30][31] and commercial buildings [32][33][34][35][36][37]. In particular, IoT-based approaches more accurately estimate thermal and scheduling models to minimize energy used by HVAC systems [38][39][40][41][42][43]; these systems currently consume about 50% of building energy consumption in developed countries [44][45][46]. ...
... Currently, researches about IoT in SB are mainly focused on ICT and sensor technologies. Cao, Chen, Xiao, and Sun (2010), Coates, Hammoudeh, and Holmes (2017) and Guestrin (2005) used wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) in their work and considered joint problems of control and ICT in WSANs for building control. (Wei & Li, 2011) assessed wireless sensor network which can connect sensors (lighting sensor and HVAC sensors) to accomplish the acquisition of consumption information data in SB. ...
High share of energy consumption in buildings and subsequent increase in greenhouse gas emissions along with stricter legislations have motivated researchers to look for sustainable solutions in order to reduce energy consumption by using alternative renewable energy resources and improving the efficiency in this sector. Today, the smart building and socially resilient city concepts have been introduced where building automation technologies are implemented to manage and control the energy generation/consumption/storage. Building automation and control systems can be roughly classified into traditional and advanced control strategies. Traditional strategies are not a viable choice for more sophisticated features required in smart buildings. The main focus of this paper is to review advanced control strategies and their impact on buildings and technical systems with respect to energy/cost saving. These strategies should be predictive/responsive/adaptive against weather, user, grid and thermal mass. In this context, special attention is paid to model predictive control and adaptive control strategies. Although model predictive control is the most common type used in buildings, it is not well suited for systems consisting of uncertainties and unpredictable data. Thus, adaptive predictive control strategies are being developed to address these shortcomings. Despite great progress in this field, the quantified results of these strategies reported in literature showed a high level of inconsistency. This is due to the application of different control modes, various boundary conditions, hypotheses, fields of application, and type of energy consumption in different studies. Thus, this review assesses the implementations and configurations of advanced control solutions and highlights research gaps in this field that need further investigations.
... In [16] [12] a video surveillance application was proposed to perform adaptive crowd counting analysis to overcome the challenge of occupancy overlapping in previous studies and [17]. The proposed approach employed collaborative Gaussian models (GP) with different kernels designed for occupant counting. ...
Abstract- Today, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Condition (HVAC) equipment account for an average of 60% of total traditional building energy consumption. A high percentage of this consumption was avoidable through efficient control to avoid ventilation of vacant space as well as operating automatic and continues adjusting ventilation rate proportional to the number of occupancies equipment presently in space. Recent research focuses on implementing various strategies to leverage the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) by transforming traditional homes into smart homes, which can monitor meteorological data and occupied areas by turning HVAC equipment ON at a specified ventilation rate. These researches have attained an overall average of 45% accuracy and 30% energy saving potential. The existing strategies suffer from false human occupancy detection and estimation in order to accordingly set ventilation rate to serve occupancies proportionally. This research aimed to improve human occupancy detection and introduce HVAC fuzzy controller by estimating the occupancies number and setting ventilation rate according to their requirement. The study uses a thermal camera approach to collect occupancy information and methodological data as input to the controller to operate HVAC equipment. The experimental analysis shows the proposed controller has achieved significant energy saving an acceptable comfort level.
Keywords -HVAC, tracking, occupant, smart, window
... Coates et al. [32] described the challenges in the deployment of IoT systems for smart buildings. ...
Residential and commercial buildings are undergoing a dramatic change, and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are shaping the future of these buildings. Researchers have recently utilized IoT in a variety of applications and settings to transfer conventional buildings into smart, efficient, and secure buildings. While functional IoT approaches have been developed, there is still a need for improvement in IoT applications and operations to understand the full potential of this technology. This improvement can properly be done by bridging the gaps of the current literature to provide a building block for future studies. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of research work on the existing technologies and applications of IoT in residential and commercial buildings. For residential buildings, studies are divided to three major categories of home automation, intelligent energy management systems, and healthcare facilities. For commercial buildings, the current literature is divided to four categories of office buildings, healthcare facilities, educational buildings, and restaurants and retail facilities. Based on the review of each category, the trends, current benefits and risks, and future challenges of the IoT implementation in the built environments are identified and discussed. In particular, integration of various IoT technologies with different capabilities, data storage and processing, and privacy and security risks are identified as the main challenges for IoT implementation. In addition, our results show that the commercial building sector has received more attention compared to the residential building sector. By providing the directions for future research opportunities, this paper benefits IoT developers and researchers to properly identify their work boundaries and define their contributions.
... The representation is present at every step, whether in the household or industry. Taking advantage of IoT opens the door to a new world where many things can be handled much more efficiently and easily (Coates, Hammoudeh, & Holmes, 2017). Although many devices can connect to a network, it is not possible to interconnect them or manage them remotely. ...
The article describes the design of a sensory network based on the Internet of Things (IoT), which will be able to monitor the emotional state of individual students, verify the functionality of the proposed system, implement innovative methods in education and adapt teaching materials based on data obtained from the sensory network. New content and methodologies developing students' analytical and creative thinking by streamlining teaching processes in applied informatics will be later reflected in professional practice through greater erudition. Research in the field of education discusses and defines two important goals in terms of diversification of higher education, the creation of a comprehensive sensory system in the field of IoT, which will record and evaluate the emotional state of individual students and on the other system will be able to adapt real-time teaching materials for the monitored student. The expected result is a streamlining of the teaching process, which will have an impact on the student in an increasing level of knowledge.
... WSN innovations promise to integrate and optimise smart buildings, autonomous vehicles, power grids, etc., to enable a successful transition towards smart, user-driven and demand-focused city infrastructures and services [1,2]. There is a wide range of current smart cities applications, which make our lives easier and more efficient, e.g., a smart phone application that let users find free parking spaces in the centre of town. ...
With the city, from its earliest emergence in the Near East between 4500 and 3100 BCE, came a wide range of new discoveries and inventions, from synthetic materials to wheeled vehicles[...]
Building automation and control systems (BAS) have become a common part of non-residential buildings in the past decades. However, many automation systems rely on severely outdated technology that render it challenging, if not impossible, to implement recently developed, advanced building control approaches. By contrast, recent developments in cloud computing and wireless technology could support solutions to these challenges. However, many stakeholders require a suitable methodology to determine the potentials and the requirements of future, possibly next generation BAS. In this paper, we thus present and apply a method to answer the open questions and define minimum requirements. For that end, we investigate available communication technologies, protocols, and interfaces. Moreover, we present a simple test bench layout that could serve as a blueprint for future, more comprehensive test benches. It is a model a ventilation circuit consisting of a CO 2 sensor for the supply air and an electronic damper. We turned these conventional components with analogue interfaces into IoT devices using a previously developed WiFi gateway. An exemplary test is the control of the CO 2 concentration using a feedback controller implemented on an external machine. We aim to extend our initial prototype to a real-life building demonstration for dynamically scalable automation systems using wireless communication and develop our set-up into a platform enabling arbitrarily complex automation strategies and artificial intelligence applications.
The deployment of IoT devices is gaining an expanding interest in our daily life. Indeed, IoT networks consist in interconnecting several smart and resource constrained devices to enable advanced services. Security management in IoT is a big challenge as personal data are shared by a huge number of distributed services and devices. In this paper, we propose a Cooperative Data Aggregation solution based on a novel use of Attribute Based signcryption scheme (\(\mathsf {Coop}\)-\(\mathsf {DAAB}\)). \(\mathsf {Coop}\)-\(\mathsf {DAAB}\) consists in distributing data signcryption operation between different participating entities (i.e., IoT devices). Indeed, each IoT device encrypts and signs in only one step the collected data with respect to a selected sub-predicate of a general access predicate before forwarding to an aggregating entity. This latter is able to aggregate and decrypt collected data if a sufficient number of IoT devices cooperates without learning any personal information about each participating device. Thanks to the use of an attribute based signcryption scheme, authenticity of data collected by IoT devices is proved while protecting them from any unauthorized access.
Joint multi-channel and slots allocation is widely adopted to improve the efficiency of wireless sensor networks. For the data center (DC) network, data transmissions are not only delivered to the sink but also the DC in the network. The traditional methods are sink first collects data, then forward to DC nodes, which inevitably brings data delay. Suppose it can meet the data acquisition requirements of the DCs without affecting the normal aggregation process, which will have practical significance in factory monitoring. In this paper, we propose a Joint Channel and Slot Allocation scheme (JCSDC) for mission-oriented Data Center in WSN. Compared to the existing works, 1) we introduce a novel joint allocation scheme which maximizes the parallelism transmission in each timeslot; 2) we modify transmission directions to build up shortcuts for datacenters. Finally, we conduct simulation experiments. The results show that JCSDC can significantly improve the packet delay without incurring data clustering process compared to the current works.
The prosperity of Internet of Things (IoT) has brought numerous advantages to individuals and organizations. Since the transmission channel is usually considered as untrusted, the notion of signcryption seems to be the desired method to ease the defect. Nevertheless, this primitive inevitably faces the new obstacle that how to search the required data without decrypting it. Therefore, inheriting the excellence of signcryption and equality test, we present a heterogeneous signcryption protocol supporting the equality test from public key infrastructure (PKI) to certificateless cryptosystem (CLC) toward IoT environment (PK‐CLET). In this way, the introduced construction not only preserves the integrity, confidentiality and unforgeability of data, but also allows the cloud server to perform the equality test on different ciphertexts. Moreover, the security of PK‐CLET as well as the performance evaluation are both shown that it is more suitable for IoT.
Since the concept of a smart city was introduced, IoT (Internet of Things) has beenconsidered the key infrastructure in a smart city. However, there are currently no detailed explanations of the technical contributions of IoT in terms of the management, development, and improvements of smart cities. Therefore, the current study describes the importance of IoT technologies on the technology roadmap (TRM) of a smart city. Moreover, the survey with about 200 experts was conducted to investigate both the importance and essentiality of detail components of IoT technologies for a smart city. Based on the survey results, the focal points and essential elements for the successful developments of a smart city are presented.
Modern Smart Buildings will utilize sensor technologies to obtain current information of the occupants and use it to provide automatic services to improve the safety, efficient use, productivity, and comfort. Energy saving is one of the promises of Smart Buildings. This can be achieved by controlling the HVAC system, lights, and other energy consuming appliances in relation to the activities of people in the building. In particular, presence is an important factor to consider. By using beacons such as those based on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and mobile phones, one can deduct occupancy information by interacting, over WiFi, with a central server. In the present study, we investigate BLE utilization for transmitting the occupancy data to the server using off-the-self devices with several parameters, e.g., distance, packet size, and line-of-sight state. Furthermore, we propose a utilization of size-constrained BLE packets for transmitting occupancy data, which was previously only possible by means of HTTP over WiFi. The result shows that it is possible to transmit occupancy data via BLE, despite of its resource constraints. Bluetooth is also shown to be about 30% more energy efficient than WiFi to perform occupancy data transmission, i.e., the mobile phone has 16 hours and 38 minutes of battery life when running on BLE communication scheme and 14 hours and 46 minutes in WiFi communication.
The growing number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices gives a great impact on every aspect of our daily lives. To increase interoperability of such devices, they are often equipped with RESTful API. To encourage developers to utilize devices by developing innovative applications, those APIs are open to the public. However, integrating IoT devices as a whole system is challenging because of the lack of API standardization. Each manufacturer defines their own API for their products. Moreover, the traditional RESTful style, which is designed based on a resource-oriented paradigm, lacks in functionality description. Consequently, application development cost increases, which obstructs innovative applications to emerge. In this paper, we present an alternative approach for API standardization, which can realize open services in smart buildings. To deal with a wide variety of devices, we design each device API to have two endpoints: attribute and state, based on device abstraction. To support developers, we provide functionality descriptions by investigating the useful information in application development and include it into attribute endpoint. To evaluate the proposed design, we implemented Smart Building API in the real building environment and developed a Smart Room Application as a use case. The comparison of the development process by using traditional RESTful style and the proposed design is analyzed. The results showed that the proposed API design succeeded in reducing the development cost and supported the developers to create application more easily.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is entering the daily operation of many industries; applications include but are not limited to smart cities, smart grids, smart homes, physical security, e-health, asset management, and logistics. For example, the concept of smart city is emerging in multiple continents, where enhanced street lighting controls, infrastructure monitoring, public safety and surveillance, physical security, gunshot detection, meter reading, and transportation analysis and optimization systems are being deployed on a city-wide scale. A related and cost-effective user-level IoT application is the support of IoT-enabled smart buildings. Commercial space has substantial requirements in terms of comfort, usability, security, and energy management. IoT-based systems can support these requirements in an organic manner. In particular, Power over Ethernet (PoE), as part of an IoT-based solution, offers disruptive opportunities in revolutionizing the in-building connectivity of a large swath of devices. However, a number of deployment-limiting issues currently impact the scope of IoT utilization, including lack of comprehensive end-to-end standards, fragmented cybersecurity solutions, and a relative dearth of fully-developed vertical applications. This article reviews some of the technical opportunities offered and the technical challenges faced by the IoT in the smart building arena.
IoT Considerations, Requirements, and Architectures for Smart Buildings
- D Minoli
- K Sohraby
- B Occhiogrosso
D. Minoli, K. Sohraby, and B. Occhiogrosso. 2017. IoT Considerations, Requirements, and Architectures for Smart Buildings. IEEE Internet of ings Journal 4,
1 (Feb 2017), 269-283. DOI:h p://dx.doi.org/10.1109/JIOT.2017.2647881