Design and Validation of a Multi-Protocol IoT Open Architecture for Environmental Sensing and Actuation

This paper presents the design, implementation, and validation of a multi-protocol IoT architecture for environmental sensing and actuation, deployed at two university laboratory sites in Greece over an 18-month period. The architecture integrates Z-Wave and ZigBee wireless protocols through open-HAB middleware, time-series storage in InfluxDB, and analytics-ready Parquet exports. A key contribution is the bidirectional MQTT control plane achieving median command latency of 287 milliseconds and over 99.92% success rate. Quantitative results demonstrate exceptional data reliability with temperature sensing completeness exceeding 98%. HVAC control validation shows median setpoint response time of 18 minutes, enabling practical demand response applications. The open-source reference implementation demonstrates scalability on commodity hardware.