Novel Sensor Network Architecture for Intelligent Building Environment Monitoring and Management

Innovations in the design and construction of sustainable green buildings have gained significant interest in recent years. It has been estimated that the deployment of an intelligent monitor and control systems can result in around 20% savings in energy usage and play a crucial role in green buildings. Among various emerging technologies, wireless sensor network (WSN) for building management has been becoming an increasingly feasible approach. However, because of the extreme constraints on system size (and hence the battery capacity), frequent battery recharging or replacement for a sensor node is unavoidable and suffers from unaffordable labor cost. Thus, limited energy availability in a WSN poses a big challenge and obstacle to wide deployment of WSN based building automation and management systems. In this paper, the authors introduce and discuss two emerging techniques (i.e., energy harvesting and power line communication) that have potentials to be integrated together and provide a significant improvement on cost, performance, convenience and reliability. To achieve low-cost high-efficiency building automation and management, a hybrid system diagram and operation mechanism is proposed in this paper. A case study is also provided to demonstrate how the proposed system mitigates the inherent weakness of WSN systems.