by Chris Parker
 November 8, 2007

What’s driving the Building Automation Market to Wireless?
There is a major shift occurring in the building automation market; the shift to wireless sensor networks. Recent advances in wireless communications and the availability of low-power micro-sensors, embedded processors and radios is supporting the use of distributed wireless sensing over a wider range of building automation applications. The market drivers concerning the choice to go wireless for building owners:

• Lower total costs: wiring is expensive, up to $200 per foot. The ability to monitor and control has become much less expensive in a wireless environment.

• Energy Management: increased measuring points allows for the optimization of energy consumption. As lowering energy costs is a primary concern for most facility managers and building owners, consumption optimization is critical.

• Flexibility and Scalability: wireless sensors can be placed in locations where it was not feasible for wiring and as the cost per wireless node comes down, the number of sensor points can increase tremendously.

• Ease of Retrofitting: wireless sensors are a much easier way to retrofit buildings and equipment with additional monitoring than having to run additional wires through existing infrastructure.

Although wireless sensors eliminate a significant portion of the labor and wiring costs associated with wired networks, there is still room for improvements and many adopters have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed. The inhibitors to wide scale adoption by building owners are:

• Reliability: even with the frequency hopping and network improvements over the past few years, reliability of the wireless signals is the number one concern of the early adopters.

• Confusion over Standards: companies are waiting for definitive standards because they require interoperability. Many companies will simply not adopt the technology until firm standards have been ratified.

• Battery life: what is the battery life of a wireless sensor? Good question; because the current battery life is a condition of the frequency of transmissions and the amount of data being transmitted, definitively answering that question is very difficult and that has held some companies back from deploying the technology.

• Enterprise Integration: companies see the value in wireless sensors, but they also see the value in providing that data into their existing BAS or enterprise applications. Many of the current solutions solve one single problem (i.e. HVAC or lighting controls) but a user wants to be able to see all the data aggregated through one single system.

Even with some companies holding back their adoption of wireless sensors, there are currently hundreds of projects underway and thousands of nodes being deployed. Much of this activity is occurring in the small to mid-sized buildings and retrofit opportunities before it moves into the large commercial building market.

The “Big 5” Wireless Applications for Building Automation

Lighting Controls
Wireless sensors will provide a wide variety of lighting applications previously too expensive or difficult to wire. The flexibility and scalability of wireless solutions provides support for advanced lighting applications in multiple locations, conserving energy and reducing costs. Such applications will dim the lights during the brightest times of the day or when the room is empty.

HVAC Controls
Many of the large building HVAC units are offering limited levels of intelligence currently, but smaller buildings often lack the automation and control to provide energy management. Wireless sensor networks provide simple and less expensive applications for humidity controls, air quality monitoring, and advance climate controls. The wireless systems provide a more continuous monitoring solution that simply is not feasible using wires.

Security
Remote access controls (i.e. key cards, bracelets) are fairly common in large commercial buildings today. However, the flexibility and scalability of mesh networks will create more connectivity through a wider range of advanced applications such as perimeter security, smoke / fire / carbon monoxide detection, and digital video surveillance. These systems will become more accessible for the small to mid-size buildings and give greater information access to the large commercial BAS (Building Automation Systems).

Asset Location and Health Monitoring
Wireless sensors can dramatically reduce the cost of monitoring the health of equipment and assets. This type of continuous monitoring will in turn reduce the number of repair and replacement costs to an organization. Applications will range from simple temperature monitoring for boilers and refrigeration units to complex vibration monitoring of pumps and motors. The wireless monitoring systems will not only save on the cost of wiring, but can provide a mobile solution that can be easily moved from one piece of equipment to another without re-wiring or loss of connectivity.

With improvements in RLTS (real-time location systems), not only will companies be monitoring the health of assets, they can also track the movements of those assets within storage facilities, office buildings or even campus environments. Recent chipsets being added to node configurations have location accuracy to as close a few meters. Companies can know the location and status of their assets at any time.

Energy Management
While Energy Management has some overlap with HVAC, Asset Monitoring and lighting controls, it is clearly the key feature in the application of wireless sensor networks within Building Automation. Energy management is a major concern for facility managers; reducing energy consumption by 1% per year can save an organization thousands of dollars. Energy management systems will include monitoring current load at various points throughout a building and providing data that can be analyzed to optimize energy usage. Wireless sensors will provide the capability to collect data from many additional sensor points in remote areas or on equipment that was previously inaccessible by wires.

The Need for Enterprise Integration of Wireless Sensors
Due to the rising use of wireless sensors, there is increased amount of data available to a building owner or facility manager that wasn’t available five years ago. The value of this data is being seen on an enterprise wide scale and there is a growing need to integrate this information with systems outside the automation and controls world. While current wireless sensor and control system providers are attempting to address this need, their solutions, regardless of how they are portrayed, are nothing more than extensions of their own proprietary protocols.

Wireless sensor networking requires new views surrounding Enterprise Integration – no longer are the control systems and the IT departments separated. There is a growing need for IT based frameworks, not control based applications, to resolve the issues of interoperability among the different building automation solutions, the device protocols, and the wireless communication standards.

Once that concept is adopted, applications can deliver sensor data, which in the past was only meant for a BAS, to their ERP, work order ticketing, or maintenance tracking system. Eventually, data will be able to proliferate into virtually every level of business operations and that will require software that is designed to handle large amounts of data from disparate systems.

Chris Parker is the Vice President of Business Development for Octave Technology.

About Octave Technology, Inc.
Octave Technology builds leading edge software products for data management and integration of sensor technologies. Octave’s flagship product, the OCTAVEX™ Wireless Sensor Framework, is the world’s most complete and comprehensive software for extracting and analyzing information from any type of wireless sensor. The framework is designed to significantly decrease development time and lower costs and risks for software developers, systems integrators, end users, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) who are building wireless sensor solutions.

Octave is a privately held corporation headquartered in Ellicott City, Md. For more information on Octave Technology, please email info@octavetech.com or visit www.octavetech.com.