Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1132978
July/August/September 2019 I 45 FIGURE 7: BACnet continues as the dominant communications protocol as it has throughout the years. Especially in North America, its influence just keeps growing. Image source: BSRIA. FIGURE 8: BACnet has shown a strong upward trend over the last few years, reaching 64 percent adoption global market share in 2017. Data from BSRIA. 8 BACnet EXTENDED ITS SHARE AS THE PREDOMINANT COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL MODBUS 3% KNX 0% CAN Bus 0% Proprietary 20% BACnet 62% MODBUS 3.9% KNX 4.9% Other 0.7% CAN Bus 0.5% Proprietary 20.6% LonWorks 14.8% BACnet 54.6% NORTH AMERICA WORLD GROWING SHARE OF BACnet AND KNX - BACnet's share: 48% in 2012 ; 55% in 2013 - LonWorks share: 17% in 2012 ; 15% in 2013 - Proprietary share: 26% in 2012 ; 21% in 2013 - KNX share: 4% 2012 ; 5% in 2013 - BACnet strong in North America, 59% in 2012 ; 62% in 2013. LonWorks 15% DEVELOPMENT YEAR For the 5 year period from 2012 to 2017, BACnet has had stong upward market share trend as more and more users and suppliers adopt it. BACNET 2012 49% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% 2012 2013 52% 2014 54% 2015 58% 2016 63% 2017 64% Credit: BSRIA 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 BAS devices have a fail-safe mode so that lighting, heating and cooling will turn back on. That depends, however, on whether the devices were configured accurately; this presents possible safety and physical security ramifications. Facility managers may set certain devices to remain off and others to turn back on. If the access key to a door is not set to lock in fail-safe mode, for example, the door might as well be wide open. These devices do not respond to anything until they have been reset and the systems are working properly again, so facility managers must configure them correctly the first time. Although hackers sometimes use this high traffic vulnerability to their advantage for DDoS attacks, there are plenty of buildings failing and going offline with no malicious players at the root of it. There are simply too many devices that are misconfigured. Too many are set to send broadcast traffic with global Who-Is requests (intended to identify devices on the network) every minute or change of value (COV) updates for the smallest of incremental changes in temperature or for other BAS variables. Much of that traffic is completely unneces- sary and is caused by broadcast messaging where unicast—or no message at all—would suffice. When BAS devices are not configured properly, important data collection suffers.