SmartCampus: A user-centric testbed for Internet of Things experimentation

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not only about improving business processes, but has also the potential to profoundly impact the life of many citizens. Likewise the IoT can provide an useful tool for the longitudinal observation of human behavior and the understanding of behavioral patterns that can inform further IoT technology design. Today experimentation with IoT technologies is predominately carried out in lab based testbeds. There is however an emerging need for increased realism of the experimentation environment, as well as involvement of real end users into the experimentation lifecycle. In this paper we present SmartCampus, a user centric experimental research facility for IoT technologies. The current testbed deployment is focused on Smart Buildings, a key building block for cities of the future. Unlike current lab based testbeds, SmartCampus deeply embeds heterogeneous IoT devices as a programmable experimentation substrate in a real life office environment and makes flexible experimentation with real end users possible. We present the architecture realization of the current facility and underlying considerations that motivated its design. Using several recent experimental use cases, we demonstrate the usefulness of such experimental facilities for user-centric IoT research.