Internet and Intelligent Buildings

This week’s reading gave us a better insight into what the internet is, it’s history and what all of those acronyms mean like IP and TCP. The two articles I found for this week involve sensors, buildings and the internet. 

The first article I found was actually a YouTube video titled Dust Networks: Helping Build Smart Cities of the Future. It featured something called a dust networks and how they can be used for intelligent buildings and intelligent cities.  Dust networks are vast networks of tiny computers nearly microscopic in scale that can record information around them and sends that information to a computer. One example the video gives is that dust networks can be placed on train tracks to see if a particular train is running on time.  In a buildings like an office building these sensors can recognize a when an employee walks in can automatically get his/her computer up and running by the time he/she sits down at their desk.   These devices that make up the dust networks are designed to be very small, low power and affordable technology.  The realties seem to be far off for right now but this could be the next big leap in technology.  They also do not go into detail on how these networks would be installed. 

The second article titled "Design of energy consumptionmonitoring and energy-saving management system of intelligent building based onthe Internet of things,"  discusses how the Internet of Things can help make buildings more intelligent. This Internet of things is essentially a sensor network that gathers information about things like a specific building user, lighting, weather and more.  The first part of the paper discusses what makes an intelligent building and the energy saving benefits it can provide. The second part goes into what is this “Internet of Things”, which is the process of objects such as sensors and computers talking to each other and having some connection between the two.  The third part discusses how this can be used to make buildings run more efficiently.  The author breaks down this system in three layers, a sensor layer where the building gathers information through sensors, a network layer that connects these sensors to each other and to computers to interpret the data and finally an application layer that puts into action the information the computer interpreted from the data by the sensors.  This could be something like a daylight sensor, if the sensor picks up information like if it is cloudy out or nightfall it can send that data over a network (wired or wireless) to a computer that can interpret that data and tell the building to turn on the lights.   The realities for this seem to be in our reach but there are still some technical issues that need to be dealt with such as wireless network performance and data management.