REPORT: IoT Arena @ LuxLive 2016 – Day 1

This year, for the first time, Iotosphere is attending Lux Live 2016, Britain’s biggest lighting event which takes place in London’s ExCel on 23-24 November 2016.

Lighting industry is among early IoT adopters and is using cutting-edge technologies which are drawing lots of attention these days. IoT and Big Data are so important in this sector that organizers scheduled two days of various talks, debates and showcases related to IoT. These events are taking place at the dedicated place – IoT Arena, one of four round theatres at the exhibition.

First day at IoT Arena saw 13 talks and a panel discussion. We will give here the highlights from some of the presentations.

IoT evangelists from the lighting world said…

Dan Tutunea of Gooee compared wired and wireless connectivity in regards to flexibility, reliability, cost and security. He went through advantages and drawbacks of DALI, Power over Ethernet and KNX when put against Bluetooth and ZigBee. Wireless solutions are more flexible, cheaper to deploy, upgrade and maintain but are facing challenges in terms of security.
Sieben de Vries of Chess Wise talked how lighting leads the IoT revolution in Smart Buildings industry. He listed some of the applications of IoT in building automation:

• smart lighting
• smart blinds (react on the time of the day, temperature; made of material which reflects sunlight cutting down cooling costs and also which prevents heat dissipation during the night decreasing heating costs)
• smart A/C systems
• occupancy sensors
• alarms
• smart badges for applying access policies

He presented a practical application of Chess Wise’s solution for smart buildings – MyriaMesh, on the example of Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Mr Vries emphasized the importance of open APIs for standardization and interoperability and predicted application of “smart valves” for remote control of heating systems.

Presentation about Li-Fi given by Nikola Serafimovski of PureLiFi brought much attention. He explained brief history of this very young but very promising technology which is already replacing Wi-Fi in some places. He showed how it is applied in Sogeprom building in Paris. Li-Fi works with wide range of LED devices which are usually equidistantly distributed on ceilings across all space thus providing much better coverage than Wi-Fi which can have “shadow zones”, depending on the location of Wi-Fi repeaters. Li-Fi also has advantages over Wi-Fi in terms of security as light is enclosed within walled space but is not a silver bullet for overcoming all security problems of today.

Gooee‘s second speaker, Jan Kemeling touched the topic of the Big Data in the context of Smart Buildings. He emphasized that data collected by sensors shall not be considered as product per se as the real product is value given to users (customers, occupiers, landlords):

• creating better experience & convenience for users
• reducing energy costs (smart lighting & heating systems)
• location based, 1 to 1 advertising
• tracking assets
• reducing cleaning costs

Mr Kemeling pointed out that the biggest threat to lighting companies are telecom companies as they’ll start selling smart lighting as a service (subscription based lighting on demand, secured lighting on demand for a bit more price…).

Andrew Bickley of Arrow Europe gave a breakdown of all applicable communication protocols that are used (or will be used soon) in Smart Lighting. He gave special attention to the newest wireless communication protocol – Thread, which official standard was published 3 weeks ago. Thread comes as inherently secure protocol as it is based on IPv6.

The last talk at IoT Arena today was given by Timo Pakkala of Casambi and it was about Bluetooth. He predicted a bright future for this low-energy, secure protocol which is already widely used.