Fog computing framework for location-based energy management in smart buildings

Abstract

Today, intelligent building includes real information systems based on a large number of sensors and actuators interconnected through communication networks. However, their complexity is also growing. The arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigms can take an increasingly important place in building energy management, and greatly improves its ability to collect, analyze and render data as knowledge. This complexity and growing data require powerful computing resources that can be provided by the cloud computing paradigm. Despite the widespread use of cloud computing, it presents some problems, such as unacceptable latency, lack of mobility, and localization support. As a result, fog computing has emerged as a promising infrastructure for providing elastic resources at the edge of the network. This paper presents a new Fog and location based smart building energy management framework, an integrated structure in which applications running on objects compute, route, and communicate together via the IoT devices installed in the building. This holistic framework decreases latency and improves energy saving and the efficiency of services among things with different capabilities. In addition, the location of users used in our framework, rationalizes energy consumption in buildings. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conducted our experiments in an appropriate virtual scenario describing the details of this approach.