Smart sensor network for smart buildings

In the new age of technology, internet and ever-improving communications many trends and fields have been appearing, such as smart phones and their applications, internet of things, renewable energy sources and smart buildings. The latter utilizes a number of aspects from the former, as the size of the buildings keeps growing, the engineers and designers aim to reduce energy consumption and ecological footprint, make the building safer and more sustainable. This has stimulated the growth of the field of sensor networks. This paper discusses a smart sensor network which utilizes Power over Ethernet, P.o.E., supplied by a Cisco Catalyst 4507R+E switch and cloud computing to provide an easily scalable and adaptable system that would be able to adapt easily to a wide array of applications and fit the demands of new trends. The system was tested on Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone microcontroller boards as sensor hubs, and uses DigitalOcean as the cloud computing service of choice. The server in this implementation acts as a user interface, front end, and as the console unit, back end. The system has demonstrated to have fast communication times of below 200ms in a cross-continental setting and able to provide fast processing times of under 1s.