Newman_2010.pdf

B 8 B A C n et ® To d a y | A Su p p l em e nt to AS H R A E Jo u r n a l N o v em b e r 20 1 0 About the Author

H. Michael Newman is manager of the Building

Automation and Control Systems Integration group

in the Facilities Operations department at Cornell

University in Ithaca, N.Y. He was chair of the BACnet

Committee from 1987 until 2000 and is chair of the

ASHRAE Standards Committee.

By H. Michael Newman, Fellow ASHRAE

Broadcasting is not evil. The concept of sending messages to all possible recipients on a network is a normal and extremely useful technique that is used by many different protocols, not just BACnet. Some of the most common network architectures, for example, the Internet Pro-tocol (IP) on an Ethernet Local Area Network (LAN), would be incredibly har…