Wireless sensor and actuator networks for energy efficiency in buildings

Residential and business buildings account for a very large fraction of the world-wide energy consumption. To improve their energy efficiency, building management systems (BMS) - based on (wireless) sensor and actuator networks - have been proposed. To be effective a BMS must be responsive, robust and scalable. Since its performance is mainly determined by the underlying sensor and actuator network, in this paper we focus on the communication between sensors and actuators. Specifically, to minimize congestion, latency and energy consumption, we propose a de-synchronization algorithm that is able to arrange, dynamically, periodic transmissions from different sensor nodes in a round-robin collision-free style, like in conventional TDMA. Unlike TDMA, however, it does not require synchronization, and is able to adapt to changes in the network topology. Our preliminary results show that the proposed algorithm converges to a steady-state in a limited number of periods.