Experimental Performance Evaluation of Sensor-Based Networking for Energy Efficiency in Smart Buildings

This chapter presents measurements based experimental research carried out in the context of the EU/FIRE project HOBNET on on energy efficiency, with application to green, smart buildings of the Future Internet. In particular, we discuss two aspects of experimentation: a) experimental evaluation of sensor network protocols (with a focus on how to efficiently and distributively achieve energy balance in the network towards prolonging its lifetime); critical components of such experimental research (reference deployments, mobility profiles, performance metrics and their trade-offs, protocol properties and families) are also discussed b) specialized application commissioning (which we exemplify via presenting a smart watering application developed in the project). Our experience suggests that measurements based experimental research can nicely complement rigorous performance analysis and simulation based evaluation providing more realistic performance results and contributing to the validation and fine tuning of the high level algorithms. In this respect, we note that current ad hoc approaches are useful but there is a need to further converge to widely accepted, common integrated methodologies, systems and tools.