Fog BEMS: An Agent-Based Hierarchical Fog Layer Architecture for Improving Scalability in a Building Energy Management System

It has been found that a cloud building energy management system (BEMS) alone cannot support increasing numbers of end devices (e.g., energy equipment and IoT devices) and emerging energy services efficiently. To resolve these limitations, this paper proposes Fog BEMS, which applies an emerging fog...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Sustainability 2020-04, Vol.12 (7), p.2831
Main Author: Lee, Eun-Kyu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Augmented reality
Building automation
Cloud computing
Collaboration
Communication
Computer centers
Data processing
Energy
Energy management
Fog
Internet of Things
Modular design
Nodes
Performance evaluation
Sustainability
User needs
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It has been found that a cloud building energy management system (BEMS) alone cannot support increasing numbers of end devices (e.g., energy equipment and IoT devices) and emerging energy services efficiently. To resolve these limitations, this paper proposes Fog BEMS, which applies an emerging fog computing concept to a BEMS. Fog computing places small computing resources (fog nodes) just next to end devices, and these nodes process data in real time and manage local contexts. In this way, the BEMS becomes distributed and scalable. However, existing fog computing models have barely considered scenarios where many end devices and fog nodes are deployed and interconnected. That is, they do not scale up and cannot be applied to scalable applications like BEMS. To solve the problem, this paper (i) designs a fog network where a list of functionally heterogeneous nodes is deployed in a hierarchy for collaboration and (ii) designs an agent-based, modular programming model that eases the development and management of computing services at a fog node. We develop a prototype of a fog node and build a real-world testbed on a campus to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system. We also conduct experiments, and results show that Fog BEMS is scalable enough for a node to connect up to 900 devices and that network traffic is reduced by 27.22–97.63%, with varying numbers of end devices.
ISSN:2071-1050
2071-1050
DOI:10.3390/su12072831