Information Centric Building Automation

The concept of the ICN (Information Centric Networking) keeps gaining popularity. It is seen as an evolution of the Internet, away from a host - centric paradigm, to a network architecture with named information as a focal point (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-centric_networking). While this is a very scientific definition, it all is very applicable to building automation.

Building automation is all information centric. Yes, many systems today depend on unicast device addresses to (a) interpret what is reported by sensor nodes and (b) send commands to actor nodes. But the ICN approach will allow them to walk away from this unnecessary level of complexity, driven primarily by the old networking paradigms. Named information is what matters.

The underlying messaging paradigm is publish-subscribe. Users (Internet of Humans - IoH) or things (Internet of Things - IoT) interested in receiving specific content subscribe to it, while content owners advertise their content and publish it (i.e., they transfer it to the subscribers, by default through multicast).

In IoH, the most widely used ICN system is Twitter: you publish to a hashtag or subscribe to it.

In IoT, Bluetooth mesh has pioneered this paradigm and made it the cornerstone for building automation.

A few examples. Lights in a room are interested in occupancy in this room as well as in the ambient light level. To satisfy this, sensors (occupancy and ambient light) publish the information to the #room. So any light that subscribes to #room, knows the occupancy in the room and the ambient light level in the room. And can adjust accordingly. Wall-wash lights may subscribe to this information too and so may the corridor lights. #room in each case is one of 16384 available group addresses or a 128-bit virtual address. Same goes with temperature. Sensors publish the temperature and other devices subscribe to it.

The ICN approach is a perfect fit for building automation. It radically simplifies the configuration, reduces network traffic and creates a fully redundant system, such that does not have any single point of failure. On top of that it reduces costs, by eliminating the old-fashioned control panels.