Fault Tolerant BBMD in the BACnet/IP Protocol

Abstract

Digital communication networks have become a core technology in advanced building automation systems. BACnet (building automation and control networks) is a standard data communication protocol designed specifically for building automation and control systems. BACnet provides BACnet/IP protocol for data communication through the Internet. BACnet/IP device uses BBMD (BACnet broadcasting management device) to deliver BACnet broadcast messages. In this study, we propose a fault tolerant BBMD in the BACnet/IP protocol. The fault tolerant BBMD improves the connectivity of BACnet/IP networks by inheriting the operation of the original BBMD to the backup BBMDs. The fault tolerant BBMD was designed to provide backward compatible with the original BACnet/IP devices. In this study, we implemented the fault tolerant BBMD and examined its validity using an experimental model.