Realizing a Smart University Campus: Vision, Architecture, and Implementation

The revolution in Internet-connected devices like cameras, occupancy detectors and air quality monitors, collectively dubbed as the Internet-of-Things (IoT), is enabling the realization of smart environments ranging from homes and offices to campuses and cities. In this paper, we describe our journey (admittedly still in its early days) towards the realization of a smart campus in a large University with over 50,000 students; 10,000 staff; and nearly 100 acres of real-estate. We begin by charting out the vision of the smart campus, focusing on how IoT technologies can benefit various stakeholders including students, staff, and estate managers. Our second contribution outlines a systematic approach to the architecture of a smart-campus, that horizontally separates the sensing, data storage, and analytics layers. We show that our approach prevents vertical lock-in to any IoT vendor, scales to arbitrary number and type of sensors, and permits analytics across data silos. Lastly, we describe our pilot IoT deployments pertaining to four use-cases on our campus, specifically classroom attendance, student study space usage, parking lot occupancy, and bus-stop wait-times. The data and preliminary insights obtained from these deployments provide quantifiable benefits to stakeholders, such as improved space usage and enhanced user experience.