The Design, Implementation, and Deployment of a Smart Lighting System for Smart Buildings

There is an increasing interest in Internet of Things (IoT) enabled smart buildings over the past decades. However, the development of smart buildings is impeded by the high installation/maintenance cost and the difficulty of large-scale evaluation in the wild. In this paper, we report the design, implementation, and deployment of an emergency light-based smart building solution. The key advantage of the system is that it is built on the top of the existing facilities in the building (i.e., emergency light). As a case study, we have implemented and deployed our system in nine production smart buildings of different types including residential, commercial office, and warehouse of multiple level building complexes. Using real data from four typical buildings, we show the proposed system can achieve >97% average packet delivery rate. Evaluation results also demonstrate the stability and robustness of the system to environmental changes. The results of this paper provide practical insights to facilitate the development of smart building systems.