Smart Buildings
The shift towards intelligent, autonomous devices and the high network speeds available at increasingly lower prices has led to a slow but steady convergence of traditionally separate network functions. Voice and security systems were the first ones to make the transition. But as smart devices, the components of the smart buildings technology, become increasingly capable, many other systems, from lighting and energy metering to HVAC and elevators, are making the transition to a consolidated structure, where they share the same data network.
This makes the data network critical to exploiting a smart building ecosystem in London – or rather, as we will see, makes the data network the very fabric of smart building intelligence. Adopting this radically different perspective and implementing it in a durable manner is a challenge to the facility and IT managers, engineers and technicians alike. Today, we would like to discuss the main aspects of this paradigm and offer some practical tips for its implementation.
Smart Buildings: An Integrated Ecosystem
What constitutes a smart building? Siemens, one of the leading vendors of smart building solutions, describes smart buildings as starting with “an infrastructure […] based on a robust, open operating system that supports a well-connected and integrated network of building systems and controls”.
Traditionally, facilities such as security, HVAC and lighting systems were separate and largely independent from each other. Smart buildings are what you get when you bring them together: in other words, it’s cross-system integration that puts the “smart” in “smart buildings”.
What systems do smart buildings integrate?
The main candidates are the communications, security, monitoring, access, lighting, elevators and HVAC systems. Energy metering, and fire and other emergency services are also integrated to a high degree, but due to legal and security reasons, their functionality tends to be less dependent on data communication.
Why are these systems integrated?
Integration is both a technical objective and an opportunity in itself. As we will see shortly, large-scale integration has its benefits in terms of cost, both upfront and in the long run. But integration is what enables these separate systems to collaborate and form a larger, more intelligent system, capable of making useful decisions. This is what grants smart buildings an increased operational efficiency, lower costs, and greater flexibility for your business.
Integration and Business Requirements
So far, this looks rather intimidating. Some of those systems are complex enough on their own that they almost belong to separate branches of engineering. Where does one even begin to think of integrating them?
Requirements drive integration decisions. The modern IoT industry may not give that impression, but integrated access control systems and lighting systems, for example, did not arise because two young geeks woke up one day and thought, “Well, I wonder what happens if we put these two together”.
What happened, in fact, was that facility managers wanted an automated solution to the problem of lights being left on after business hours, or in infrequently-accessed areas such as basements.
This is a trivial example, but it illustrates a wider point: integration decisions should be driven by legitimate business requirements. Typical examples of such requirements include:
- Operational requirements, such as granting and logging access to parking spaces based on a vehicle’s number plate (ANPR camera system).
- Commissioning and exploitation requirements, such as allowing only certain persons to tweak a system’s parameters.
- Service, maintenance and infrastructure development requirements, such as quickly figuring out if a component is functioning or not, or obtaining data about its use.
- Decommissioning and environmental impact requirements
The exercise of narrowing down these requirements is useful regardless of which side of the facility divide you are. If you are a tenant, knowing what to integrate will help you prioritise deployment and installation activities. If you are a facilities owner or manager, knowing your customers’ requirements will help you prioritise infrastructure development and plan servicing and maintenance.
Infrastructure-level integration
Large-scale infrastructure integration is the foundation of application-level integration. However, it has both short-term and long-term advantages of its own, which are worth discussing separately.
Wired networks are the main mechanism of large-scale infrastructure integration. Smart devices use a variety of communication protocols, both wired and wireless, but the vast majority of inter-system traffic is carried out through the wired data network of a building.
Consequently, most of the infrastructure-level integration is carried out in terms of cabling, which is the fabric of a network’s infrastructure.
Media type consolidation is the most common and accessible opportunity that infrastructure integration affords. Today, most sections of a typical company network need only two or three types of cabling: copper Cat6 or Cat6a cabling for office networks and short-range data network integration, and fibre optic cabling – such as OS1, OS2, OM2 or OM3, for high-bandwidth and/or long-range (over 100 meters) applications, such as security cameras. Many company networks can be built almost exclusively over Cat6/Cat6e cabling, with high-speed fibre links reserved for data centres and core network sections.
Other cable types that used to be common until not so long ago include coaxial cables (mainly for CCTV systems) and Cat3 cables (primarily for voice communication equipment). However, the industry is shifting away from these, not so much for performance reasons (coaxial cable, for example, is still sufficient for basic CCTV use) but for practical reasons.
Fewer cable types mean less effort in terms of logistics and maintenance, and fewer media conversion equipment.
Structured data cabling solutions are the other widespread aspect of infrastructure-level integration. Structured cabling is a cabling design methodology that uses a uniform set of elementary building blocks for each section of a network. The design of every section – from the work area to the equipment room – is made according to an industry-accepted set of guidelines, which leads to a uniform and flexible cabling infrastructure.
Managing diversity is the primary challenge of infrastructure-level integration. Voice and security devices have been quick to make the transition to IP networks, and many of them can be plugged right into a network switch or can connect over a Wi-Fi network.
However, other protocols are still in use, and for good reasons. ZigBee and Bluetooth, for example, have very low power requirements, making them ideal for battery-powered devices. HVAC systems often use protocols such as BACnet and Modbus for both compatibility and technical reasons.
Integrating these devices into the company network will require application-specific gateway equipment and software, sometimes universal, sometimes vendor-supplied. You should consider your options before committing to an investment; the reliability of the data connection will depend not only on the cabling infrastructure but also on the quality of the gateway equipment.
Application-Level Integration
The integration of command and data streams (in short, at the application level) is what turns a collection of independent devices into a smart system. Infrastructure integration facilitates application-level integration, but it is the latter that allows you to tap into a smart building’s potential.
The range of choices you have for application-level integration depends primarily on the devices that you use. More precisely, it depends on:
- The capabilities of the devices : what actions they can perform and what data they can expose over the network
- The devices’ compatibility and standards compliance, which dictates how well they integrate with other devices, from other vendors and of different types.
Open standards and ecosystems are what give you the best long-term guarantees in this regard. Protocols standardised by vendor alliances, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth or Ethernet, offer you a wealth of choices in terms of devices, easy replacement of EOL-ed devices whose vendors have gone out of business, and continuous improvement and support.
Where devices that use standardised and/or open technologies are not available, the deployment of proprietary protocols, media and equipment should be confined to narrow sections of the network, and the gateway should be located as close to the edge of the network as possible. In other words, their proprietary-format traffic should be harmonised with the rest of the network as early as possible.
Data is where the potential for value resides. Smart systems use short-term data to make decisions and aggregate long-term data to perform analytics and derive improvements. This means that optimising data traffic is paramount to smart building integration. The optimisation requirements for short-term and long-term data are largely complementary:
Short-term data, mainly from sensors and security devices, is often latency-constrained. Latency requirements vary significantly by application: control, safety, video, analytics and occupant-facing systems each have different thresholds, which should be set per application and vendor design. A well-specified physical infrastructure supports low, consistent latency, though end-to-end performance also depends on switching, routing, radio, compute, software, traffic and operations.
Long-term data used for analytics is, by necessity, bandwidth-dependent. Fortunately, it is gathered from the “leaves” of the network devices at its very edge, so the large volume is evenly spread throughout the network and only consolidated in core sections. Provisioning for long-term edge-to-core scalability, through a solid scaling strategy and structured cabling deployment, is the best way to support the long-term viability of your smart building analytics system, though outcomes also depend on the software, compute and operational practices layered on top.
Conclusions
Smart buildings offer an unprecedented chance to make business activities more cost-efficient and more environmentally friendly. However, smart building systems require integration in order to be leveraged efficiently. Integration is carried out both at a physical level (cabling and wireless network connection) and at the application level.
Physical-level integration is particularly challenging because building infrastructures are long-lived, often in the range of 30-40 years, and the lifespan of a network’s cabling infrastructure can be in the same range. In other words, decisions related to infrastructure-level integrations can have repercussions over several generations of application-level devices.
The cabling industry has developed a number of design practices and strategies to make this integration work in the long run. At ACCL, we have spent more than 28 years working on cabling projects for smart and regular buildings in London and the surrounding areas. Get in touch with us and schedule your FREE, no-obligation on-site survey.
Frequently Asked Questions: Smart Building Systems
Q. What is smart building connectivity?
It is the network that lets a building’s systems talk to each other and to the people who run it: cabling, Wi-Fi and the switches that power and connect sensors, cameras, access control, lighting and heating controls. Good connectivity is planned as one system rather than separate networks for each supplier.
Q. Why should smart building systems share one network?
A shared, well-designed network costs less to install and run than separate networks for every system, and it lets data move between them, for example access control triggering lighting or heating. It needs careful design so critical systems are separated and secured, but it gives facilities teams one place to manage and monitor.
Q. What cabling does a smart building need?
Usually structured cabling to Cat6a with a fibre backbone. Cat6a carries data and higher power over Ethernet to access points, cameras, sensors and lighting controls, so one tidy infrastructure supports many systems. Spare capacity and good documentation matter, because the number of connected devices in a building keeps growing.
Q. What is RTLS in a smart building?
RTLS stands for real-time location system. It uses tags and receivers, often over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, to show where people, equipment or assets are inside a building. Uses include finding equipment in hospitals, tracking stock and measuring how spaces are used. It relies on good wireless coverage and the cabling behind it.
Q. What makes a commercial building smart?
A commercial building is smart when its systems collect data and act on it: heating and lighting that respond to occupancy, access control linked to security cameras, energy use that is metered and managed. The technology matters less than the integration, so start with what the building owner wants to measure and improve.
Q. Is Wi-Fi enough to connect a smart building?
Not on its own. Wi-Fi suits phones, laptops and some sensors, but cameras, access points, controllers and many building systems need a cable for reliability and power over Ethernet. Most smart buildings combine structured cabling, Wi-Fi and low-power wireless for battery sensors.
Q. Can an existing building be upgraded into a smart building?
Yes, in stages. Survey the existing cabling and Wi-Fi, decide which systems to connect first, often energy, lighting and security, then add cabling and network capacity where it is missing. Each stage should follow one overall design so later systems can join the same network.
Written by
Wayne founded ACCL in 1997 and has led more than 28 years of project delivery, helping organisations design, install and modernise the network infrastructure behind reliable connectivity, office moves and refurbishments. His experience spans copper cabling, fibre backbones, data centre infrastructure, Wi-Fi, CCTV and access control. About ACCL
