An Overview of Technologies for Lower Energy Consumption in Smart Buildings

In the last decade, the significant development of smart building technologies has led to the formation of various energy sensing and monitoring applications. Energy monitoring of appliances relies on techniques such as Intrusive Load Monitoring (ILM) and Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM). ILM is referred to a technique that a sensor installed for each load. In NILM method, disaggregation of measured energy of all appliances at utility service entry is the main goal to provide a simple and cost-effective method of monitoring the appliances like sequence time domain reflectometry (STDR). This manuscript provides an overview of developments in energy consumption sensing and monitoring in three key areas of Internet of things (IoT), WSN and STDR for the advancement of smart building technology. This paper also provides some research directions for smart home of the future.