6LoWPAN: The wireless embedded Internet - Part 2: 6LoWPAN history, market perspective & applications

Facility management is a very interesting application for the Internet of Things, and is one use case that has been examined in detail by the SENSEI project [SENSEI]. It involves the integrated management of building facilities. Facility management services are becoming more common, and are typically web-based. Figure 1.6 shows a facility management use case from the SENSEI project. Wireless embedded networking has a large range of applications in facility management including:

• Door access control: Access control involves the use of RFID or active tag based identifiers to control and log the access to different parts of a building automatically.

• Building automation: Building automation involves the use of sensors and control to improve the operations and efficiency of a building.

• Tracking: Tracking involves the use of active tags on people, equipment and supplies which are tracked by the wireless infrastructure throughout a facility. Tracking results are used in asset management, security and logistics optimization.

• Energy reduction: Energy reduction in facilities can be achieved through intelligent lighting control, heating control, ventilation and air conditioning control, and the automatic power control of electric equipment.

• Maintenance: The maintainability of facilities can be improved through the remote monitoring of the building itself and the systems in the building which today are typically monitored manually.

• Smart metering: The use of resources in large facilities can be reduced and better controlled through more intelligent metering of electricity, gas and water using an automatic metering infrastructure (AMI).

The stakeholders in facility management include the providers of intelligent facility management systems and services, users of these services and third parties. The providers of facility management services play an important role as a huge amount of data needs to be collected, processed and leveraged to provide the services required in a beneficial way. The automation systems in facilities may include access control, building automation, tracking, maintenance monitoring and metering systems.

Users of facility management include building owners or renters, building users and facility managers. Additionally many third parties are involved with facility management such as security companies, insurance companies and utilities. Some of these stakeholders are identified in Figure 1.6.

The main rationales for facility management are improvements in energy and resource efficiency, an increase in worker productivity, and more secure and comfortable buildings. Buildings are major consumers of energy: it is estimated that in the EU and the USA, 40 percent of all energy is consumed in the building sector [Baden06, DoE06], and that carbon emissions could be reduced by 22 percent through improved efficiency [2002/91/EC]. For the enterprise users of buildings, an even more important benefit is improved worker efficiency along with better comfort and security in general. Substantial cost savings may be possible through productivity improvements.

Facility management provides many technical challenges for embedded devices and networking. The large range of systems to be integrated needs interoperability between systems, as well as network integration of heterogeneous technology. Furthermore new devices and applications will be added over time, so evolvability is important.

The scalability of wireless embedded networking in large buildings is demanding. The density of devices in a single space can reach hundreds of nodes, and there is a mix of fixed and mobile devices across a large area. Battery-powered wireless devices require intelligent networking designed to maximize the lifetime of devices, and thus reduce maintenance.

Facility management systems and devices must be cost-efficient, and installation straightforward compared to the long-term benefits achieved through these services. Finally, although privacy is easier in enterprise networks, security is a challenging aspect when applying wireless embedded networking. We will consider how to apply 6LoWPAN to solve networking requirements such as these throughout this book.

Coming up in Part 3: 6LoWPAN architecture.

Printed with permission from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Copyright 2009. "6LoWPAN: The Wireless Embedded Internet" by Zach Shelby and Carsten Bormann, ISBN: 978-0-470-74799-5. For more information about this title and other similar books, please visit John Wiley & Sons.

Related links:
6LoWPAN: The wireless embedded Internet - Part 1: Why 6LoWPAN?
Top Embedded Internet How-To's of 2010 (so far)
Web services for smart objects - Part 1: Overview | Part 2: Performance | Part 3: A real-world web service system for smart objects
Analyzing 6LoWPAN Networks
Signal Chain Basics (Part 24): Basic networking using the IEEE 802.15.4 PHY/MAC protocol
Clearing up the mesh about wireless networking topologies: Part 2
Rise of the Embedded Internet