“Especially important was the easy, flexible self-organizing network that could be installed and operational in a very short time."
Smart Buildings
The commercial building sector includes office buildings, retail outlets, hotels, hospitals, universities, light industrial buildings, and research centers. Today, the market is undergoing sizable change as energy awareness and "green" building technology are taking the limelight from more mundane topics. Dubbed "building intelligence," the focus is now on improvements in building automation, energy management, and security in commercial buildings. These exciting trends are fueled by the following factors:
- The rapidly growing use of sensors and dramatically lowered installation and operation costs of highly reliable, low power wireless mesh networks.
- Increased convergence between Web-enabled IT systems and all other building automation systems (BAS), including; voice, video, data, security, environmental management, and maintenance systems.
- The need to use open protocols to "plug and play" with equipment from various vendors, generally using extensible markup language (XML) and simple object access protocols (SOAP).