Mites: Design and Deployment of a General-Purpose Sensing Infrastructure for Buildings

There is increasing interest in deploying building-scale, general-purpose, and high-fidelity sensing to drive emerging smart building applications. However, the real-world deployment of such systems is challenging due to the lack of system and architectural support. Most existing sensing systems are purpose-built, consisting of hardware that senses a limited set of environmental facets, typically at low fidelity and for short-term deployment. Furthermore, prior systems with high-fidelity sensing and machine learning fail to scale effectively and have fewer primitives, if any, for privacy and security. For these reasons, IoT deployments in buildings are generally short-lived or done as a proof of concept. We present the design of Mites, a scalable end-to-end hardware-software system for supporting and managing distributed general-purpose sensors in buildings. Our design includes robust primitives for privacy and security, essential features for scalable data management, as well as machine learning to support diverse applications in buildings. We deployed our Mites system and 314 Mites devices in Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Hall at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a fully occupied, five-story university building. We present a set of comprehensive evaluations of our system using a series of microbenchmarks and end-to-end evaluations to show how we achieved our stated design goals. We include five proof-of-concept applications to demonstrate the extensibility of the Mites system to support compelling IoT applications. Finally, we discuss the real-world challenges we faced and the lessons we learned over the five-year journey of our stack's iterative design, development, and deployment.