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54
Occupancy-driven energy management for smart building automation
- In BuildSys
, 2010
"... Buildings are among the largest consumers of electricity in the US. A significant portion of this energy use in buildings can be attributed to HVAC systems used to maintain comfort for occupants. In most cases these building HVAC systems run on fixed schedules and do not employ any fine grained cont ..."
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Cited by 50 (4 self)
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Buildings are among the largest consumers of electricity in the US. A significant portion of this energy use in buildings can be attributed to HVAC systems used to maintain comfort for occupants. In most cases these building HVAC systems run on fixed schedules and do not employ any fine grained control based on detailed occupancy information. In this paper we present the design and implementation of a presence sensor platform that can be used for accurate occupancy detection at the level of individual offices. Our presence sensor is low-cost, wireless, and incrementally deployable within existing buildings. Using a pilot deployment of our system across ten offices over a two week period we identify significant opportunities for energy savings due to periods of vacancy. Our energy measurements show that our presence node has an estimated battery lifetime of over five years, while detecting occupancy accurately. Furthermore, using a building simulation framework and the occupancy information from our testbed, we show potential energy savings from 10 % to 15 % using our system.
Evaluating the effectiveness of model-based power characterization
- In Proceedings of the 2011 USENIX conference on USENIX annual technical conference (USENIXATC'11
, 2011
"... Accurate power characterization is important in computing platforms for several reasons ranging from poweraware adaptation to power provisioning. Power characterization is typically obtained through either direct measurements enabled by physical instrumentation or modeling based on hardware performa ..."
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Cited by 35 (3 self)
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Accurate power characterization is important in computing platforms for several reasons ranging from poweraware adaptation to power provisioning. Power characterization is typically obtained through either direct measurements enabled by physical instrumentation or modeling based on hardware performance counters. We show, however, that linear-regression based modeling techniques commonly used in the literature work well only in restricted settings. These techniques frequently exhibit high prediction error in modern computing platforms due to inherent complexities such as multiple cores, hidden device states, and large dynamic power components. Using a comprehensive measurement framework and an extensive set of benchmarks, we consider several more advanced modeling techniques and observe limited improvement. Our quantitative demonstration of the limitations of a variety of modeling techniques highlights the challenges posed by rising hardware complexity and variability and, thus, motivates the need for increased direct measurement of power consumption. 1
Dynamic Resource Allocation Using Virtual Machines for Cloud Computing Environment
"... Abstract—Cloud computing allows business customers to scale up and down their resource usage based on needs. Many of the touted gains in the cloud model come from resource multiplexing through virtualization technology. In this paper, we present a system that uses virtualization technology to alloca ..."
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Cited by 32 (0 self)
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Abstract—Cloud computing allows business customers to scale up and down their resource usage based on needs. Many of the touted gains in the cloud model come from resource multiplexing through virtualization technology. In this paper, we present a system that uses virtualization technology to allocate data center resources dynamically based on application demands and support green computing by optimizing the number of servers in use. We introduce the concept of “skewness ” to measure the unevenness in the multidimensional resource utilization of a server. By minimizing skewness, we can combine different types of workloads nicely and improve the overall utilization of server resources. We develop a set of heuristics that prevent overload in the system effectively while saving energy used. Trace driven simulation and experiment results demonstrate that our algorithm achieves good performance. Index Terms—Cloud computing, resource management, virtualization, green computing Ç 1
DejaView: A Personal Virtual Computer Recorder
, 2011
"... Continuing advances in hardware technology have enabled the proliferation of faster, cheaper, and more capable personal computers. Users of all backgrounds rely on their computers to handle ever-expanding information, communication, and computation needs. As users spend more time interacting with th ..."
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Cited by 32 (6 self)
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Continuing advances in hardware technology have enabled the proliferation of faster, cheaper, and more capable personal computers. Users of all backgrounds rely on their computers to handle ever-expanding information, communication, and computation needs. As users spend more time interacting with their computers, it is becoming increasingly important to archive and later search the knowledge, ideas and information that they have viewed through their computers. However, existing state-of-the-art web and desktop search tools fail to provide a suitable solution, as they focus on static, accessible documents in isolation. Thus, finding the information one has viewed among the ever-increasing and chaotic sea of data available from a computer remains a challenge. This dissertation introduces DejaView, a personal virtual computer recorder that enhances personal computers with the ability to process display-centric content to help users with all the information they see through their computers. DejaView
Non-Intrusive Occupancy Monitoring using Smart Meters
"... Detailed information about a home’s occupancy is necessary to implement many advanced energy-efficiency optimizations. How-ever, monitoring occupancy directly is intrusive, typically requir-ing the deployment of multiple environmental sensors, e.g., mo-tion, acoustic, CO2, etc. In this paper, we exp ..."
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Cited by 13 (6 self)
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Detailed information about a home’s occupancy is necessary to implement many advanced energy-efficiency optimizations. How-ever, monitoring occupancy directly is intrusive, typically requir-ing the deployment of multiple environmental sensors, e.g., mo-tion, acoustic, CO2, etc. In this paper, we explore the potential for Non-Intrusive Occupancy Monitoring (NIOM) by using electricity data from smart meters to infer occupancy. We first observe that a home’s pattern of electricity usage generally changes when oc-cupants are present due to their interact with electrical loads. We empirically evaluate these interactions by monitoring ground truth occupancy in two homes, then correlating it with changes in statisti-cal metrics of smart meter data, such as power’s mean and variance, over short intervals. In particular, we use each metric’s maximum value at night as a proxy for its maximum value in an unoccupied home, and then signal occupancy whenever the daytime value ex-ceeds it. Our results highlight NIOM’s potential and its challenges.
Managing Plug-Loads for Demand Response within Buildings
- In ACM Workshop on Embedded Sensing Systems For Energy-Efficiency In Buildings (BuildSys
, 2011
"... Detailed and accurate energy accounting is an important first step in improving energy efficiency within buildings. Based on this information, building managers can perform active energy management, especially during demand response situations that require load shedding over short time scales. While ..."
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Cited by 12 (1 self)
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Detailed and accurate energy accounting is an important first step in improving energy efficiency within buildings. Based on this information, building managers can perform active energy management, especially during demand response situations that require load shedding over short time scales. While individual plug-loads are an important target for demand response, they pose significant challenges due to their distributed nature and the significant diversity of devices that are deployed. This paper presents the design and implementation of our energy accounting and management system which is specifically geared towards managing plug-loads within enterprise buildings. Our system provides fine-grained visibility and control of plug-loads to building managers, allowing them to deal with demand response situations through userspecified actuation policies. At its core, our system consists of our wireless smart energy meter with actuation capabilities, ZigBee-based wireless network infrastructure, and our Demand Response Server, an analysis engine that provides interfaces for initiating load-shedding policies. Our microbenchmarks show the different methods that building managers can utilize to efficiently manage devices during demand response events.
A Survey on Techniques for Improving the Energy Efficiency of Large Scale Distributed Systems
"... The great amounts of energy consumed by large-scale computing and network systems, such as data centers and supercomputers, have been a major source of concern in a society increasingly reliant on information technology. Trying to tackle this issue, the research community and industry have proposed ..."
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Cited by 10 (1 self)
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The great amounts of energy consumed by large-scale computing and network systems, such as data centers and supercomputers, have been a major source of concern in a society increasingly reliant on information technology. Trying to tackle this issue, the research community and industry have proposed a myriad of techniques to curb the energy consumed by IT systems. This article surveys techniques and solutions that aim to improve the energy efficiency of computing and network resources. It discusses methods to evaluate and model the energy consumed by these resources, and describes techniques that operate at a distributed system level, trying to improve aspects such as resource allocation, scheduling and network traffic management. This work aims to review the state of the art on energy efficiency and to foster research on schemes to make network and computing resources more efficient.
Sleepless in seattle no longer.
- In USENIX
, 2010
"... Abstract: In enterprise networks, idle desktop machines rarely sleep, because users (and IT departments) want them to be always accessible. While a number of solutions have been proposed, few have been evaluated via real deployments. We have built and deployed a sleep proxy system at Microsoft Rese ..."
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Cited by 7 (0 self)
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Abstract: In enterprise networks, idle desktop machines rarely sleep, because users (and IT departments) want them to be always accessible. While a number of solutions have been proposed, few have been evaluated via real deployments. We have built and deployed a sleep proxy system at Microsoft Research. Our system has been operational for six months, and has over 50 active users. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to report on lessons learned from building, deploying and running a sleep proxy system on a real network. Overall, we find that our system allowed user machines to sleep quite well (most sleeping over 50% of the time), but much potential sleep time was missed due to IT management tasks that play havoc with machine sleep. We suggest a number of ways to fix this problem. We also discover and address a number of issues overlooked by prior work, including complications caused by IPsec. We found certain popular cloud-based applications did not work well with our design, and we deployed an ad-hoc fix to the problem. We believe our experience and insights will prove useful in guiding the design of future sleep solutions for enterprise networks.
ABSTRACT Insomnia in the Access or How to Curb Access Network Related Energy Consumption
"... Access networks include modems, home gateways, and DSL Access Multiplexers (DSLAMs), and are responsible for 70-80 % of total network-based energy consumption. In this paper, we take an in-depth look at the problem of greening access networks, identify root problems, and propose practical solutions ..."
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Cited by 6 (0 self)
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Access networks include modems, home gateways, and DSL Access Multiplexers (DSLAMs), and are responsible for 70-80 % of total network-based energy consumption. In this paper, we take an in-depth look at the problem of greening access networks, identify root problems, and propose practical solutions for their user- and ISP-parts. On the user side, the combination of continuous light traffic and lack of alternative paths condemns gateways to being powered most of the time despite having Sleep-on-Idle (SoI) capabilities. To address this, we introduce Broadband Hitch-Hiking (BH 2), that takes advantage of the overlap of wireless networks to aggregate user traffic in as few gateways as possible. In current urban settings BH 2 can power off 65-90 % of gateways. Powering off gateways permits the remaining ones to synchronize at higher speeds due to reduced crosstalk from having fewer active lines. Our tests reveal speedup up to 25%. On the ISP side, we propose introducing simple inexpensiveswitchesatthedistributionframeforbatchingactive lines to a subset of cards letting the remaining ones sleep. Overall, our results show an 80 % energy savings margin in access networks. The combination of BH 2 and switching gets close to this margin, saving 66 % on average. Categories andSubject Descriptors
Understanding the Role of Buildings in a Smart Microgrid
"... Abstract—A ‘smart microgrid ’ refers to a distribution network for electrical energy, starting from electricity generation to its transmission and storage with the ability to respond to dynamic changes in energy supply through co-generation and demand adjustments. At the scale of a small town, a mic ..."
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Cited by 4 (0 self)
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Abstract—A ‘smart microgrid ’ refers to a distribution network for electrical energy, starting from electricity generation to its transmission and storage with the ability to respond to dynamic changes in energy supply through co-generation and demand adjustments. At the scale of a small town, a microgrid is connected to the wide-area electrical grid that may be used for ‘baseline’ energy supply; or in the extreme case only as a storage system in a completely self-sufficient microgrid. Distributed generation, storage and intelligence are key components of a smart microgrid. In this paper, we examine the significant role that buildings play in energy use and its management in a smart microgrid. In particular, we discuss the relationship that IT equipment has on energy usage by buildings, and show that control of various building subsystems (such as IT and HVAC) can lead to significant energy savings. Using the UCSD as a prototypical smart microgrid, we discuss how buildings can be enhanced and interfaced with the smart microgrid, and demonstrate the benefits that this relationship can bring as well as the challenges in implementing this vision. I.
