Connected Indoor Lighting Based Applications in a Building IoT Ecosystem

Indoor lighting and buildings play a pivotal role in reducing the energy footprint of cities, and in their transformation into digital, smart environments. Connected indoor lighting systems in particular, with embedded sensing, control, and networking technologies, can provide an attractive platform for enabling data to optimize lighting operations and also to improve performance of other building and enterprise management systems. In this article, we provide architectural elements of a connected indoor lighting system. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are described for lighting system control and data access that facilitates easy and scalable integration for services in a building Internet of Things ecosystem. By considering Power-over-Ethernet lighting in office buildings as an example, we present traditional applications like energy monitoring, remote system monitoring, and configuration that are becoming data-driven, as well as new ones like building space management and data services enabled by the APIs.