Building energy metering and environmental monitoring - A state-of-the-art review and directions for future research

Buildings are responsible for 40% of global energy use and contribute towards 30% of the total CO2 emissions. The drive to reduce energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions from buildings has acted as a catalyst in the increasing installation of meters and sensors for monitoring energy use and indoor environmental conditions in buildings. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in building energy metering and environmental monitoring, including their social, economic, environmental and legislative drivers. The integration of meters and sensors with existing building energy management systems (BEMS) is critically appraised, especially with regard to communication technologies and protocols such as ModBus, M-Bus, Ethernet, Cellular, ZigBee, WiFi and BACnet. Findings suggest that energy metering is covered in existing policies and regulations in only a handful of countries. Most of the legislations and policies on energy metering in Europe are in response to the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), 2002/91/EC. However, recent developments in policy are pointing towards more stringent metering requirements in future, moving away from voluntary to mandatory compliance. With regards to metering equipment, significant developments have been made in the recent past on miniaturisation, accuracy, robustness, data storage, ability to connect using multiple communication protocols, and the integration with BEMS and the Cloud – resulting in a range of available solutions, selection of which can be challenging. Developments in communication technologies, in particular in low-power wireless such as ZigBee and Bluetooth LE (BLE), are enabling cost-effective machine to machine (M2M) and internet of things (IoT) implementation of sensor networks. Privacy and data protection, however, remain a concern for data aggregators and end-users. The standardization of network protocols and device functionalities remains an active area of research and development, especially due to the prevalence of many protocols in the BEMS industry. Available solutions often lack interoperability between hardware and software systems, resulting in vendor lock-in. The paper provides a comprehensive understanding of available technologies for energy metering and environmental monitoring; their drivers, advantages and limitations; factors affecting their selection and future directions of research and development – for use a reference, as well as for generating further interest in this expanding research area

Standards-based wireless sensor networks for power system condition monitoring

This paper assesses the industrial needs motivating interest in wireless monito ring within the power industry, and reviews applications of WSN technology for substation condition monitoring (Section 2). A key contribution is the identification of a set of technical requirements for substation - based WSNs, focused around security requi rements, robustness to RF noise, and other utility - specific concerns (Section 3). Section 4 comprehensively assesses the suitability of various IWSN protocols for substation environments, using these requirements. A case study implementation of one standar d, ISA100.11a, is reported in Section 5, along with deployment experience. The paper concludes by describing future research challenges for WSN protocols which are specific to this domain

Wireless Portable Microcontroller based Weather Monitoring Station

Weather monitoring and its forecasting has become vital part of day-to-day life because of its numerous applications in agriculture, farming, fishery, shipping and military operations. Measuring the weather using conventional or manually operated Weather Monitoring Stations requires skilled labor for operation and demands regular maintenance which invariably increases the life cycle cost of the Weather Monitoring Station. To address these issues, the authors of this paper have attempted to design and implement inexpensive Wireless Portable Weather Monitoring Station using PIC16F887 microcontroller. The implemented Weather Monitoring Station is equipped with sensors to measure weather variables such as relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, solar radiation, wind speed, wind direction, surface and ambient temperature. Besides of these capabilities, the designed Weather Monitoring station also includes some unique features like Modbus communication protocol, which provides seamlessly communication of real time weather measurements to the base station (PC Laptop) over both wired (RS serial) and wireless (Xbee Pro modules) interfaces. Further, at the base station, the received data is logged and uploaded to an online data server to enable worldwide ubiquitous access to the weather measurements. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Tiarrah Computing: The Next Generation of Computing

The evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) brought about several challenges for the existing Hardware, Network and Application development. Some of these are handling real-time streaming and batch bigdata, real- time event handling, dynamic cluster resource allocation for computation, Wired and Wireless Network of Things etc. In order to combat these technicalities, many new technologies and strategies are being developed. Tiarrah Computing comes up with integration the concept of Cloud Computing, Fog Computing and Edge Computing. The main objectives of Tiarrah Computing are to decouple application deployment and achieve High Performance, Flexible Application Development, High Availability, Ease of Development, Ease of Maintenances etc. Tiarrah Computing focus on using the existing opensource technologies to overcome the challenges that evolve along with IoT. This paper gives you overview of the technologies and design your application as well as elaborate how to overcome most of existing challenge

An open virtual testbed for industrial control system security research

ICS security has been a topic of scrutiny and research for several years, and many security issues are well known. However, research efforts are impeded by a lack of an open virtual industrial control system testbed for security research. This thesis describes a virtual testbed framework using Python to create discrete testbed components (including virtual devices and process simulators). This testbed is designed such that the testbeds are interoperable with real ICS devices and that the virtual testbeds can provide comparable ICS network behavior to a laboratory testbed. Two testbeds based on laboratory testbeds have been developed and have been shown to be interoperable with real industrial control systemequipment and vulnerable to attacks in the samemanner as a real system. Additionally, these testbeds have been quantitatively shown to produce traffic close to laboratory systems (within 90% similarity on most metrics)

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are penetrating our daily lives, and they are starting to be deployed even in an industrial environment. The research on such industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) considers more stringent requirements of robustness, reliability, and timeliness in each network layer. This Special Issue presents the recent research result on industrial wireless sensor networks. Each paper in this Special Issue has unique contributions in the advancements of industrial wireless sensor network research and we expect each paper to promote the relevant research and the deployment of IWSNs