From Vertical to Horizontal Buildings Through IoT and Software Defined Approaches

Smart Building/Environment management is an interesting topic that, although widely investigated in the literature, has not seen wide adoption in real case studies. Current Smart Building solutions provide facilities for: i) automatically managing HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) systems; ii) energy management, iii) building automation. Current solutions are tightly coupled with the underlying IT infrastructure of the building and cannot be rearranged according to the events, catastrophic or otherwise, that may modify the building structure (e.g., a disruption to sections of a building). In this work, we present a novel approach for Smart Buildings (we refer to it as "Software Defined Building 2.0") to customize and reprogram IT infrastructure powering buildings, this way enabling cooperation among Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) operating within. We analyze an architecture enabling this approach, evaluating overhead management and its impact on systems’ performance.