Retrofitted IoT Based Communication Network with Hot Standby Router Protocol and Advanced Features for Smart Buildings

The use of renewable energy sources near the load centres brought the concept of building power systems. Further, the modern smart buildings increase operational efficiency, safety, and consumer comfort, where, all the operations are monitored/controlled by central monitoring and control unit (CMCU). For reliable communication between the components of smart building and the CMCU, a well-established network with advanced features such as user alerts, usage details, remote control, link failure handling, security, etc., is essential. However, the conventional IoT network can’t provide all these features, especially the fault tolerance, where, communication failure is usually observed in remote control operations when there exists any link failure. This is the major drawback of conventional networks. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes a retrofitted IoT based communication network with Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP) for remote monitoring and control of smart building devices. This proposed network provides a redundant path during the link failures, thereby ensures reliable communication in the network. This is the major contribution of this paper. Besides, this network possesses advanced features viz., Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) firewall to provide intrusion prevention (blocking unauthorized packets), Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol to enable the broker for broadcasting messages to all the subscribers of a particular topic, and email alert to provide communication between different users. Altogether, this proposed communication network enhances the reliability of smart buildings, which is simulated and verified using Cisco Packet Tracer 7.3.1. The results show that the proposed HSRP based network performance is better than the conventional network.