Work-in-progress: Industry-friendly and native-IP wireless communications for building automation

Abstract

Wireless communication technologies for building automation (BA) systems are evolving towards native IP connectivity. More Industry Friendly and Native-IP Wireless Building Automation (IF-NIP WiBA) is needed to address the concerns of the entire value chain of the BA industry including the security, reliability, latency, power consumption, engineering process, and independency. In this paper, a hybrid architecture which can seamless support both Cloud-Based Mode and Stand-Alone Mode is introduced based on the 6LoWPAN WSAN (wireless sensor and actuator networks) technology and verified by a prototyping minimal system. The preliminary experimental results suggest that, 1) both the WSAN and Cloud communications can meet the requirements of non-real-time application of BA systems, 2) the reliability and latency of the WSAN communications is not sufficient for soft real-time applications but it is not far away to meet such requirements by sufficient optimization in the near future, 3) the reliability of Cloud is pretty sufficient but the latency is quite far from the requirement of soft real-time applications. To optimize the latency and power consumption in WSAN, design industrial friendly engineering process, and investigate security mechanisms should be the main focus in the future.