EMIoT: A LoRa-enabled Smart Building Solution Based on Emergency Lights

Deployment of the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart buildings has received considerable interest from both the academic community and commercial sectors. Unfortunately, the widespread adoption of current smart building solutions is inhibited by the high costs associated with installation and maintenance. Moreover, different types of IoT devices from different manufacturers typically form distinct networks and data silos. There is a need to use a common backbone network that facilitates interoperability and seamless data exchange in a uniform way. In this paper, we present EMIoT, a novel solution for smart buildings that breaks these barriers by leveraging existing emergency lighting systems. In EMIoT, we embed a wireless LoRa module in each emergency light to turn them into wireless routers. EMIoT has been deployed in more than 50 buildings of different types in Sydney, Australia and has been successfully running over two years. We present the design and implementation of EMIoT in this paper. Moreover, we use the deployment in a residential building as a use case to show the performance of EMIoT in real-world environments.