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

TLDR

Smart energy in buildings is a critical IoT research area, and building energy efficiency is essential for environmental sustainability. The authors propose an IoT framework that uses smartphone and cloud technologies to provide location‑based automated, networked energy control for building‑, user‑, and organizational‑level energy proportionality. They built a LEED‑gold testbed, collected a year of energy usage data, and developed a smartphone‑cloud IoT prototype that implements the proposed framework. Experiments show that centralized static controls can reduce green building efficiency, but the proposed framework improves energy proportionality, yielding significant energy savings and broader sustainability benefits.

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.