An Internet of Things Framework for Smart Energy in Buildings: Designs, Prototype, and Experiments

TL;DR

This paper presents an IoT framework for smart energy management in buildings, utilizing location-based controls and cloud computing to enhance energy efficiency and sustainability through real-world experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel IoT framework with location-aware energy control, supported by a prototype and experiments demonstrating improved energy proportionality in buildings.

Findings

Energy usage data analysis shows current controls are inefficient.

The proposed IoT framework improves energy proportionality.

Real-world experiments confirm effectiveness of the control system.

Abstract

Smart energy in buildings is an important research area of Internet of Things (IoT). Buildings as important parts of the smart grids, their energy efficiency is vital for the environment and global sustainability. Using a LEED-gold-certificated green office building, we built a unique IoT experimental testbed for our energy efficiency and building intelligence research. We first monitor and collect one-year-long building energy usage data and then systematically evaluate and analyze them. The results show that due to the centralized and static building controls, the actual running of green buildings may not be energy efficient even though they may be "green" by design. Inspired by "energy proportional computing" in modern computers, we propose a IoT framework with smart location-based automated and networked energy control, which uses smartphone platform and cloud computing technologies to enable multi-scale energy proportionality including building-, user-, and organizational-level energy proportionality. We further build a proof-of-concept IoT network and control system prototype and carried out real-world experiments which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. We envision that the broad application of the proposed solution has not only led to significant economic benefits in term of energy saving, improving home/office network intelligence, but also bought in a huge social implication in terms of global sustainability.