Commercial buildings need to increase efficiency, improve cost savings, and enhance user comfort. There are many ways to improve a building’s energy efficiency by leveraging smart building applications by closely monitoring the environment, light, temperature, and occupant activity.
For example, occupancy sensors facilitate the analysis of space usage patterns to enable strategic decisions on offices’ design and furnishing. At the same time, movement and occupancy data show possibilities for identifying energy and waste sources and optimizing devices outside the schedule. Using IoT sensor inputs, HVAC systems can regulate the temperature, humidity, and humidity of indoor and outdoor spaces based on real-time data from sensors and motion sensors, thereby ensuring a healthy and productive indoor climate.
However, to make a building smart, especially retrofitting existing buildings, the costs of implementing wired systems often limit the installation of effective systems and sufficient sensors. Also, considering the disruption to day-to-day operations during installation, sometimes business owners are discouraged from proceeding to introduce smart control systems into their buildings. Instead of wired systems, Wireless Sensor Network can genuinely help in the situation mentioned.
A wireless sensor network consists of sensor units that are used for measurement, computing units used to process the data, and communication units that use a combination of different wireless technologies that can be utilized to enable communications between wireless nodes. Often, a wireless sensor is battery-operated since sometimes line-power is absent at the location, or getting electricity wiring is not cost-effective.
There are several wireless technologies such as BLE, ZigBee, and Z-Wave have proven that WSN can be operated with low power consumption, a feature that is very important for wireless sensors.
With the proper planning and implementation, a wireless sensor network can be just as effective as a wired network for most non-mission-critical tasks at affordable costs. Not only the lower costs of implementation, but a wireless sensor network also helps with applications by its flexibility. For example, with ever-changing office layouts, wireless has proven to be an efficient solution that can be integrated with minimal interruption to day-to-day operations and used to optimize applications in building automation systems and communications.
The inclusion of WSNs in a wide range of applications such as energy management, energy efficiency, health and safety, and security has enlightened and improved our concept of modern and safer buildings.
