Distributed Gateway Redundancy for Building HVAC Reliability
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing gateway systems in buildings are prone to failures, leading to network disruptions when a gateway goes offline, and lack the ability to detect changes in attributes of connected devices, which affects data translation efficiency.
Innovation Solution
A distributed gateway system where multiple gateways are connected to a building server, allowing for redundancy, heart-beat messaging, and dynamic configuration management, enabling one gateway to take over if another fails and monitoring device attribute changes using hash signatures.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Device complexity
If a single gateway is used to connect devices to the network, then the device complexity is reduced, but the reliability deteriorates because all devices depend on a single gateway and will go offline if the gateway fails
Solution Approach 1:
The system divides the gateway functionality into multiple distributed gateway instances instead of using a single centralized gateway. Each gateway can independently manage a subset of devices, and the building server coordinates between multiple gateways. This segmentation eliminates the single point of failure while distributing the connection burden.
Solution Approach 2:
The system pre-configures multiple gateways and establishes backup relationships before failures occur. When a gateway failure is detected through heart-beat message monitoring, the system can immediately activate backup gateways to take over device connections, minimizing downtime without requiring complex real-time decision-making during failures.
2Ease of operation
If gateway functionality is simplified to reduce complexity, then the ease of operation improves, but the ability to detect device attribute changes deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements a feedback mechanism where gateways send heart-beat messages to the building server at regular intervals, and devices send attribute change notifications to the gateway. The building server monitors these feedback signals to detect gateway status and device attribute changes, maintaining monitoring capability without increasing gateway operational complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The building server acts as an intermediary between gateways and the central management system. It handles complex monitoring and coordination tasks, allowing gateways to maintain simple functionality while the server performs sophisticated device attribute change detection through hash signature comparison and heart-beat message analysis.
Data Source
AI summary
A system providing distributed gateway services in a building includes a plurality of gateways connected to a building server. A first gateway including a processing circuit configured to receive data points from a first set of HVAC devices, generate a first point list based on the data points, send the first point list to the building server, receive a second point list for a second set of one or more HVAC devices managed by the second gateway, and receive configuration data based on the second gateway being disconnected from the building server. The configuration data includes drivers for communicating with the second set of HVAC devices. The processing circuit is configured to extract data from the second and second sets of HVAC devices based on the first point list, the second point list and the configuration data and send the extracted data to the building server.