Whitepapers

AUGMENTING BACnet WITH LoRaWAN ® WIRELESS IOT www.lora-alliance.org BEFORE LoRaWAN THERE WAS BACnet Although LoRaWAN is already implemented in many settings, from bricks-and-mortar buildings to whole cities, farms, wildlife parks and satellites, most building automation professionals are not familiar with how LoRaWAN would operate in a traditional BACnet environment. BACnet stands for Building Automation and Control Network, and BACnet is the most widely used standard for automation of built spaces and their environments. In most cases, LoRaWAN is not a replacement for BACnet, or an alternative to it – it is an enabling extension of its capabilities. Primarily a package of protocols for hard-wired communication, BACnet specifies what kind of entities can be enabled in a digitized building management system– what kind of inputs and outputs the system will accept, how the system will be networked, what kind of data will be generated and how it will be stored, as well as specifics like protocols for managing HVAC, and machines like elevators, lifts, fire safety and lighting systems. In most implementations, BACnet is hard-wired into the building infrastructure. The cost to build is relatively high, and flexibility is relatively low. Extending a BACnet build on its own terms means building more of the same. And, as the rate of change in the built environment has sped up, the costs and limitations of BACnet have become a constraint. This is an excellent opportunity to leverage applications that utilize an entirely new generation of long range, battery powered, wireless sensors. Imagine a real-world organization, a company or institution that is busy extending or reshaping its operating spaces. There is nothing exceptional about that, because in a world that is changing almost out of recognition by the Covid-19 crisis, this is what organizations everywhere are doing. Office space, labs and factories redesigned and repurposed for entirely new ways of working. Meeting rooms, libraries, hospitals and galleries have remodelled if not entirely reconfigured. Some spaces closed, but many more extended or created afresh, sometimes on very tight deadlines. In every case, the call has been for building management and control systems that are flexible enough to meet this sudden acceleration of change. Legacy control systems were built assuming a world of incremental change and stable patterns of use. The need now is for a new layer of building control technology that can extend the functionality offered by BACnet, and do it with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness demanded by fast structural change. ENTER LoRaWAN TECHNOLOGY There is now a new generation of sensors and control devices that operate outside of the rigid grid-powered networks deployed in the past. Compared to BACnet devices and infrastructures they are small, flexible and cheap – and they represent an opportunity to move control of the built environment to the next level. This is the world of LoRaWAN devices – battery-powered networking devices with power consumption so low that a single power pack can last for years. These devices can be deployed in buildings of all kinds without the need for a physical wired communications underlay to gather or distribute data. Remotely updateable and easily movable, they no longer are dependent on physical, fixed wired infrastructure. Communication through dense walls, elevator shafts or basements is outstanding, meaning that the number of LoRaWAN gateways, or access points, is an order of magnitude lower than Wi-Fi and requires no mesh points such as other wireless technologies like Zigbee. Coverage of tens of thousands of square feet is possible with a single LoRaWAN gateway. LoRaWAN IS THE SOLUTION FOR CONTROL Using an unlicensed radio spectrum, LoRaWAN networks consist of IoT devices such as sensors and actuators that communicate bi-directionally. The network may consist of many hundreds or thousands of devices and may use a local or cloud-based server that manages the network. A single LoRaWAN gateway can cover 10's of thousands of square feet, eliminating the need for deployment of multiple access points or mesh points common in other wireless networking options. Power consumption is exceptionally low, allowing battery powered devices to operate for up to ten years without service.

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