Wireless network deployment as low cost building management system solution

This paper presents the design and implementation of a wireless monitoring and actuation network for residential and commercial buildings that was carried out as part of the ARTEMIS funded project ME3gas. The aim of this deployment is to demonstrate that low cost wireless sensor networks can be used in situations where a full building management system may not be suitable technically or commercially either in residential home applications or commercial enterprises. This work focuses not just on electricity consumption but also on gas consumption into the building. The current deployment consists of a number of wireless sensor motes retrofitted throughout a residential building converted for office use. The WSN nodes are based on the Tyndall modular mote platform running the Contiki operating system and communicating with a mesh network running IPV6 through 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4 at 2.4GHz. Each node is configured for a specific task within the framework of enabling energy efficiency and these tasks can be broadly described as, environmental sensing, metering (gas and electricity) and actuation. The motes are controlled through the LinkSmart middleware platform which is an open source hardware agnostic system for building energy management, which hides the underlying physical layer allowing ease of development for web based applications, which is also demonstrated as part of this work.