A Novel Emergency Light Based Smart Building Solution: Design, Implementation and Use Cases

TL;DR

This paper introduces EMIoT, a cost-effective IoT solution for smart buildings that repurposes emergency lighting systems as wireless routers, enhancing interoperability and reducing deployment costs, demonstrated through extensive real-world deployment.

Contribution

The paper presents EMIoT, a novel IoT architecture leveraging existing emergency lights as wireless routers, enabling seamless data exchange and interoperability in smart buildings.

Findings

Successfully deployed in over 50 buildings in Sydney.

Demonstrated effective performance in real-world residential building.

Provided practical insights and lessons learned from deployment.

Abstract

Deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) in smart buildings has received considerable interest from both the academic community and commercial sectors. Unfortunately, widespread adoption of current smart building solutions is inhibited by the high costs associated with installation and maintenance. Moreover, different types of IoT devices from different manufacturers typically form distinct networks and data silos. There is a need to use a common backbone network that facilitates interoperability and seamless data exchange in a uniform way. In this paper, we present EMIoT, a novel solution for smart buildings that breaks these barriers by leveraging existing emergency lighting systems. In EMIoT, we embed a wireless LoRa module in each emergency light to turn them into wireless routers. EMIoT has been deployed in more than 50 buildings of different types in Sydney Australia and has been successfully running over two years. We present the design and implementation of EMIoT in this paper. Moreover, we use the deployment in a residential building as a use case to show the performance of EMIoT in real-world environments and share lessons learned. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of EMIoT. This paper provides practical insights for IoT deployment in smart buildings for practitioners and solution providers.