How wireless mesh networking technology can power smart buildings

Smart buildings are becoming increasingly important in the commercial real estate industry, with the smart building market expected to grow from $80.62 billion in 2022 to $328.62 billion in 2029. The forecast suggests that making buildings "smart" is more than just a fad. Instead, smart buildings can provide commercial property owners with operational and financial benefits, as well as data that can reduce heating costs, optimize building ventilation and HVAC, manage lighting, and improve the overall energy efficiency of buildings.

Additionally, smart buildings require less maintenance, reducing costs and allowing them to better optimize space, which makes tenants more comfortable and thus improves productivity.

Building smart buildings doesn’t have to be expensive

Cost is one of the biggest concerns for commercial property owners when deploying new systems in their buildings. The cost of wiring to connect sensors and subsystems is a key financial consideration when installing smart systems, but it is not as expensive as owners think. That’s because wireless Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technology have advanced to the point where owners can manage their buildings without cables. Data can be sent wirelessly to the cloud or building management system without having to rewire the building.

Advantages of Wireless Mesh Technology

Using wireless mesh technology to create smart buildings is cost-effective, especially for existing buildings. This is because in older buildings, it is difficult to run current wiring behind the walls to connect smart systems in the rooms and connect them to new smart sensors and devices.

For buildings without wires, it is difficult to power devices and get data from them. However, wireless mesh network technology solutions can bypass obstacles. The flexibility of this solution also allows builders to only need one central gateway to collect all sensor data and send it to the cloud. Repeaters and additional gateways to connect various network parts are not required.

In addition, unlike predecessors such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, wireless mesh network technology can solve problems such as power consumption, network scale and management, and data transmission reliability. The technology is designed to adapt to the new wireless world, low-power sensor networks for smart buildings, and other IoT applications. Individual nodes in the network remain inactive until needed. This ensures that all nodes are energy-efficient and the entire network can run on low power and batteries.