An Evaluation Framework for Buildings-Oriented Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) introduce significant flexibility in the management of smart buildings. The elimination of wires allows to deploy battery-powered sensor and actuator nodes everywhere in both new, old and historical buildings. Thus, WSNs can allow to monitor the building structural health, to manage electric loads for energy saving, to control the comfort environmental conditions, to help building inhabitants with safety procedures. The use of management frameworks (both general-purpose and domain-specific) is very important for this kind of networks as they transparently introduce characteristics such as efficient organization of the nodes, fast reconfiguration of the network, battery consumption optimization, and low-level and high-level data and event processing. The aim of this paper is to introduce an evaluation framework for the comparative analysis of systems that allow the management of Building WSNs. Specifically, a set of both qualitative and quantitative (performance evaluation) indicators have been defined on the basis of a study of the state of the art. Finally, the defined framework is used to evaluate the Building Management Framework system.