A hierarchical wireless network architecture for building automation and control systems

Abstract

The building automation industry is experiencing a sudden increase in the complexity of control systems, mainly due to the push towards energy efficient buildings. These systems are necessarily distributed and rely on a communication network to gather data from sensors, produce intermediate results, and send commands to actuators. These networks should be cost effective, and should be flexible enough to be easily reconfigured if the building usage changes over the years. Wireless sensor and actuator networks are, therefore, key enablers. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical wireless network architecture for building automation and control systems and a protocol to manage it. We implement gradient based routing (for collecting data) and label switching table (for disseminating configuration commands), thereby supporting upstream and downstream data flows across the network.

Publication
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Networking and Services (ICNS)