A Microservice Architecture for the Intranet of Things and Energy in Smart Buildings [Research Paper]

This paper presents challenges and issues in smart buildings and the Internet of Things (IoT), which we identified in years of research in real buildings. To tackle these challenges, a decentralized service-oriented architecture based on a message-oriented middleware has been implemented for the domain of smart buildings. It uses a network-transparent IoT message bus and provides the means for composing applications from auxiliary services, which facilitate device abstraction, protocol adaption, modularity, and maintainability. We demonstrate the flexibility of our architecture by describing how three distinct applications-privacy-enhancing energy data visualization, automated building energy management, and a generic user interface-can be integrated and operated simultaneously in our real smart building laboratory. We compare the advantages of our architecture to conventional ones and provide a best-practice solution for the Intranet of Things and Energy in smart buildings.