A secure and distributed message oriented middleware for smart building applications

In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT) and heterogeneous Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems, monolithic and proprietary Smart Building (SB) systems are unable to address the challenges of scalability, adaptability, and security. Improved integration and interoperability of the existing and future technologies are essential for overcoming the barriers of SB adoption. This paper proposes a real-time, brokerless, and message-oriented middleware (MoM) system for interfacing and interconnecting the digital and physical assets of the SB. It provides a holistic abstraction to the building management system (BMS) of the underlying device protocols and building construction properties, simplifying the design and reducing the overall system cost. Its distributed architecture scales to any building construction regardless of the devices' performance and connectivity limitations. A secure architecture ensures the integrity of data and operations, and an extensive performance and energy efficiency study validates the proposed design. While MoM systems have been traditionally used in cloud computing, it is the first time that such approach, based on building-distributed embedded electronics and the efficient ZeroMQ messaging library, is successfully validated for a cyber-physical system like the SB.