A Reference Architecture for IoT-Enabled Smart Buildings

Abstract

The management and analytics of big data generated from IoT sensors deployed in smart buildings pose a real challenge in today’s world. Hence, there is a clear need for an IoT focused Integrated Big Data Management and Analytics framework to enable the near real-time autonomous control and management of smart buildings. The focus of this paper is on the development and evaluation of the reference architecture required to support such a framework. The applicability of the reference architecture is evaluated by taking into account various example scenarios for a smart building involving the management and analysis of near real-time IoT data from 1000 sensors. The results demonstrate that the reference architecture can guide the complex integration and orchestration of real-time IoT data management, analytics, and autonomous control of smart buildings, and that the architecture can be scaled up to address challenges for other smart environments.