A SDN-based IoT Architecture Framework for Efficient Energy Management in Smart Buildings

Abstract

Energy consumption has increased drastically at global scale due to the growing urbanization in cities. Energy efficiency in smart buildings can be achieved by introducing a context-aware Internet of Things (IoT) approach, where sensors can learn from their surrounding environment to control the actuators in a coordinated network. However, the IoT network requirements are constantly changing in unpredictable fashion, which needs faster and frequent on-demand network reconfiguration. Software Defined Network (SDN) has been envisioned as a new approach to enable a flexible and agile network programmability in diverse IoT scenarios. However, the focus has primarily been on the design of the SDN computation logic, i.e. controllers, while the dynamic delivery and operations service-inferred IoT resource allocation has been postponed.To fill this gap, this paper proposes a comprehensive architectural design that is devised to empower SDN-enabled Context-Aware IoT systems and networks to create efficient energy management in smart buildings. We investigate the provision of NFV IoT functions to support distributed automation and orchestration on IoT devices, and we present a context-aware approach to gather, filter and process data from sensing data in campus buildings. We provide a proof of concept to demonstrate successful deployment and provisioning of virtualized services in the context of Smart Campus research project.