Page 477 - Shaping smarter and more sustainable cities - Striving for sustainable development goals

The readers will doubtless have raised concerns regarding the risk of hackers, viruses, or other
malicious approaches to the integrity of the environment. The building control network has to be
protected and experience to date has generally shown that providing that the network is not
exposed to a public internet and remains as a private infrastructure there is a strong ability to ensure
a very high level of protection. Since the intelligent building is largely a real time operation
monitoring a fixed number of fixed devices there is little opportunity for miscreants to have access
or to inject undesirable code or devices into the network. However, if a high value operation of a
client is involved in the building, such an attack does become an attractive proposition. Increasingly,
the security integration and resilience parameters are showing greater through life efficiencies by
not outsourcing but rather having localised community networks with intelligent local response.
This ensures continued operation in the event of an ice storm of similar 'global' event in which large
area access to the cloud and other public communication networks is lost. External monitoring is
therefore sufficient and allows effective firewalls around the operational system.

2.3 Technologies

The discussion of individual and specific technologies related to the intelligent building has been
smattered through the earlier discussion and provision of definitions for the intelligent building.
These technologies are therefore seen to depend heavily on communications in order to perform
the monitoring and provision of data to those responsible for controlling the buildings.

Communications technology of choice today, is generally based on an IP‐based network running at
any one of the standard protocols and speed. If video is not part of the intelligent building (which it
often is) then the amount of data actually exchanged between devices is relatively small. For
example reporting on the status of a lighting controller, the status of a fan motor, or the credentials
presented by a user wishing to gain access to an elevator floor are all very limited. Video cameras,
particularly those using 360° viewing fields, colour images, and real time imaging will generate vastly
more data. Provision of fibre‐based networks easily accommodate these kind of volumes and
images and the data used for such images can be significantly reduced by using well established
technologies of only recording when data changes i.e., the use of an analytic process to control data
flow. Therefore it is not easy to generalize what solution is most appropriate for the communication
infrastructure in any given application.

The redundancy or resilience of the communication infrastructure is however paramount,
particularly if many disparate systems are going to share this infrastructure as is being advocated by
this report. Use of a single infrastructure is desirable but clearly occupants will become very
frustrated if the communication infrastructure suffers a malfunction and as a result such as lighting,
telephone, signage, computer networks, access control in turn all become victims of that single
failure.
Adoption of an appropriate communication protocol to operate with each of the sub‐systems is a
function which requires cooperation between all of the design engineers. While there are lighting
control systems, access control systems, sound systems, signage systems, etc., all of which can
communicate using an IP protocol, the base commands used by some of these systems may invoke
other protocols or may restrict the selection of systems. For example industry standards have
evolved for access control systems, which have used traditionally used RS 485 based
communications. While this is a changing situation, it is appropriate to analyse and decide whether
a purely IP solution meets all of the needs for the project. Clearly, reliable power, i.e., use of
uninterruptable power supplies (UPS) or generators is as crucial as needing the provision of network
infrastructure which has resilient paths, ports, and devices. Self‐healing networks are common

ITU‐T's Technical Reports and Specifications 467