Future of Building Automation, IoT, and Decentralized Systems.
This article starts by presenting an overview of the current building automation and IoT industry state. Further sections discusses theoretical advantages and prospects of decentralized IoT systems. Finally Avalanche Subnets is proposed as one of the sensible options for future industrial developments in this area.
Building Automation, an old but innovative industry
Building automation is an old industry, traditionally each part of the building automation are separated in different sectors: HVAC, lights & blinds, security control, alarming, IT infrastructure, IoT, etc.. each of these discipline have their own separate field bus, hardware, and protocols. With time some standards became adopted by the industry, such as BACnet, KNX, Modbus, M-bus, and many others. Each of these standards have slightly different specializations and specificities. These old technologies are still today very effective and fitted to the demand. So with the arrival of new internet technologies, it has recently become necessary to build on top of those a binding layer which permits to propose new services such as the central remote management of the buildings, interactions with web applications, VPNs, cloud solutions for IoT & data storage, etc.. This is the new intercommunication layer in which our IoT gateways are particularly useful.
IoT current industry: big clouds and massive centralization
Current IoT applications rely on centralized platforms, mostly deployed by private companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and thousands of smaller entities. Most of these are based on the open source MQTT protocol, which provides simple lightweight messaging by topics. But there is no standards for the application layer on top of it. In practice security, authentication, data encoding, and topics hierarchies vary widely between manufacturers. This results in completely different systems difficult to interact with.
This server / client centralized model has many advantages for IoT companies, such as speed of development, reactive user experience, simple economic model, and keeping customers dependent on their cloud, family of products, or protocols. They also own their customers data, and have the opportunity to commercialize those to make profit.
IoT decentralization theoretical advantages
Part of the IoT industry players are already experimenting with self-maintained decentralized infrastructures, which are currently mainly used and improved by the cryptocurrency industry. The decentralized model has the following advantages:
- Increased reliability, availability, and perennity.
- Ability to transfer value (standard IoT protocols can only transfer data).
- Ability to create NFTs to control building area access or for any kind of certificate.
- Form new open source decentralized industry standards, giving independence from big company clouds.
Despite the interesting theoretical advantages of decentralization, as of today, IoT blockchains are often private and designed to offer rather specific and narrowed applications to their customers. Broader global solutions, such as IOTA, IOST, and others, are not yet fulfilling the IoT industry requirements. These blockchains are too rigid and limited in their structure to be adopted by IoT conglomerates or governmental entities. In practice, there is so many shortcomings with these systems, that it is hard to imagine a wide adoption. Subsequently IoT oriented blockchains are often viewed as hype/speculation vehicles, or in best case as a field of pioneering experimentation.
IoT Avalanche Subnet
If we don’t want to end up with the Google, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, x,y,z IoT blockchains, it is desirable for the IoT industry to conglomerate around an open-source public blockchain that is customizable enough to fulfill IoT tough requirements.
Avalanche Subnets is the one of the most promising solution known to us. While being highly programmable, Subnets also benefit from the avalanche consensus without adding any development overhead. Here are below some key points making the Subnet technology very appealing for IoT:
- Avalanche consensus is energy efficient, finalizes transactions in less than a second, and has good scalability properties.
- Enterprises or conglomerates can create their own Subnets, with permissioned control over the validators in order to comply with hardware requirements or local jurisdictions.
- Ability to create its own Virtual Machine, which can be used to define custom rules, and be optimized for IoT.
- Fees programmability. Dynamic fees, fees or absence of fees based on permissions or participation in the network.
Consequently we support the creation of an IoT Subnet for Avalanche. Considering our interdisciplinary skills, experience, and partnerships with multi-national building automation companies, we are in a good position to develop and promote the project in order to rally more actors.
While the creation of a full IoT Subnet may be premature given the current development state of Avalanche, it is a good time-frame to start working on a first Subnet implementation and present to the world new kinds of IoT dapps.
About us
Weble is a Swiss software engineers company funded in 2012. We are specialized in the development of software for IoT & building automation. Our software solutions are mainly running on small industrial embedded rail-din computers commercialized across the world with a growing success. Our products innovation and high level of customization enables any technicians to build simple or complex interactions between the vast amount of disparate protocols used in IoT and building automation projects. In 2021, we started to promote decentralized IoT solutions and integrate most promising blockchain protocols in our software. To support this initiative, we launched in July of 2021 the Weble Ecosystem Token.