A Fog-based IoT Platform for Smart Buildings

In this paper, we propose an Internet of Things (IoT) layered architecture that supports heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC), lighting and security systems in a building, depending on continuous environmental parameters monitoring and efficient occupancy detection. The proposed architecture is composed of five layers: end devices, network connectivity, fog processing, cloud processing and security and privacy layers. This architecture is used to build a prototype of an office ambience monitoring and control system. In the developed prototype, the information about the indoor ambience is collected in real-time in the end devices layer and sent using the network connectivity layer to the fog. This information is aggregated and preprocessed in the fog before being passed to the cloud where it is finally stored and analyzed. According to the analysis results, proper decisions are made and sent back to the related actuators to set the office ambience accordingly or to fire an alarm. Actuators remote control and system configuration are also provided through a web-based interface. The developed system prototype is deployed and tested to prove that the system satisfies its intended purposes.