Building Automation and Smart Cities: An Integration Approach Based on a Service-Oriented Architecture

Building automation is a vital part of many use cases related to energy efficiency and smart living in the context of smart cities. State of the art building automation systems like KNX, BACnet or ZigBee are based on control networks mainly used for local control scenarios using non-IP communications. This paper presents an integration approach for building automation systems using an IPv6 enabled service-oriented architecture allowing interconnecting heterogeneous technologies into a large-scale distributed control system. Details on the concept, a proof of concept implementation and performance evaluation results of a multi-protocol gateway are presented, offering a per-device IPv6 interface using a novel CoAP/EXI protocol binding for oBIX. The integration approach aims at providing a homogeneous integration layer that can be used to build advanced control scenarios that might arise in the context of smart cities.