A Overview on WSN Deployment and a Novel Conceptual BIM-based Approach in Smart Buildings

The rapid growing of Internet of things (IoT) is one of the most important factors of integrating WSN in smart buildings. Furthermore, the presence of these sensors and technologies allow improving the accuracy of the measured data while reducing buildings energy consumption and guaranteeing the comfort required by the indoor users. However, finding the optimal sensor nodes positions in an indoor environment with heterogeneous obstacles is the keystone to ensure a full sensing coverage with a full connectivity. To meet this challenge, various initiatives have been proposed in the literature. First, we summarize the main developed solutions to optimize WSN deployment in an indoor/outdoor environment. Then, we propose our conceptual approach that relies on exploiting BIM (Building information modeling) database to get real time and valid information about the target area. Indeed, the proposed solution can be integrated within BIM tools as a plugin in order to optimize sensors deployment in real time by taking into account nodes and obstacles heterogeneity at the same time.