Integration platform for home and building automation systems

In future buildings, all devices will be connected directly to the Internet, surrounding people with a Web of Things. That will bring the amazing possibility to control building facilities from any device with Internet access (PC, mobile phone, etc.). However, while it is already technically possible to connect devices directly to IP networks, most of home and building automation systems still use non-IP field level communication protocols. In this paper we describe an integration platform, which is an intermediate step between future IP based systems and available legacy equipment. The platform uses Web services technology for connecting devices to a stand-alone server. This approach makes the system flexible and independent from underlying platform and communication protocols. Conducted measurements with our oBIX based implementation show that our system model is efficient and can be deployed on cheap embedded devices with limited resources for computing.