Massive arrival of low-cost and low-consuming sensors in buildings: towards new building energy services

Abstract

Building is one of the most consuming sector with 5 MWh per person per year. Building energy efficiency is already addressed by countries policies but is still a topic of research. In our paper, we are addressing a new way of improving energy consumption in building, based on Internet of Things (IoT). IoT is synonymous of increase of the amount and accessibility of measurements. How is this impressive growth possible? How to use these new data to reduce building energy consumption and bring new energy performance services? IoT technologies are analysed and future tendencies are proposed. Our analysis is illustrated on the experience acquired within 2 smart building research and teaching platforms, one in Grenoble France, and the other in Hanoi, Vietnam. These research platform aim at improving energy efficiency and sobriety, and prepare building to energy grid services.

A Practical Approach to Launch the Low-Cost Monitoring Platforms for Nearly Net-Zero Energy Buildings in Vietnam

“…So, enhancing local self-consumption solutions of rooftop PV generation sources is preferred for energy efficiency and continuing the next rooftop solar generation projects in Vietnam. Nowadays, on-site renewable energy resources are integrated into the building energy supply at a low cost [7,8]. The authors of [9] pointed out the benefits of energy storage in office buildings to absorb solar electricity on-site in northeast Vietnam.…”

“…Lower-cost sensors should help increase the number of measured points in the platform to achieve more data [8], but they could also increase the number of technical issues [10].…”

“…Communication technologies: Some key factors of communication technology were presented in [25], including low cost, low energy consumption, ease of use, security, less interference, flexible capability interoperability, extensibility, and anti-interference ability, available in the local market. Current popular wireless modules include Rf24, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Lora [8]. The characteristics of these modules consist of frequency, working range, data rate, power consumption, transceiver capacity, and network structure.…”

Data Compensation with Gaussian Processes Regression: Application in Smart Building’s Sensor Network

“…Traditionally, building monitoring systems were costly and required expert knowledge (hardware and software), which made them only affordable to large commercial buildings [3]. However, the fast development of low-cost IoT technologies and open-source hardware programming provided an opportunity to build low-cost monitoring systems applicable to small and medium-scale buildings [3]. In an emerging country such as Vietnam, the research on smart buildings is in its early stages and should be based on such low-cost sensor networks.…”

“…Despite the significance of data-quality monitoring in smart buildings, most research on smart buildings only focuses on technical costs [3,5], user behaviors [6][7][8], and prediction [6,7] and control [9][10][11]. There has been no dedicated approach for data compensation in smart-building applications.…”