Amazon, Apple, Google, and Zigbee proposed creating an open standard for smart home devices

Connected Home over IP

Amazon, Apple, Google and Zigbee have organized a joint project called "Connected Home over IP" which aims to develop a single open standard based on the IP protocol designed to organize the interaction of smart home devices.

The project will be supervised by an independent working group created under the auspices of the Zigbee Alliance and not related to the development of the Zigbee 3.0 / Pro protocol. When developing the standard, technologies will be taken into account used in current products from Amazon, Apple, Google and other members of the Zigbee alliance.

It will be provided support for a universal standard common that it is not tied to the decisions of a particular manufacturer in future models of devices of the companies involved in the project. IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian also announced their willingness to join the task force.

Thanks to the future standard, developers will be able to create smart control applications for the home that work as a teams from various manufacturers and are compatible with various platforms, including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri.

The first specification will cover work in addition to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth low-energy, but other technologies, such as Thread, Ethernet, cellular networks, and broadband channels, may also be supported.

Google transferred two of its open projects for use in the Connected Home over IP workgroup: one of them is OpenWeave and the other is OpenThread, which are already used in smart home products and use the IP protocol for communication.

openweave is an application-level protocol stack to organize communication between various devices, between a device and a mobile phone, or between a device and a cloud infrastructure that uses asynchronous communication channels and the ability to work in threaded networks , Wi-Fi, Bluetooth low energy and cell phones.

Openthread is an open implementation of the Thread network protocol that supports the construction of mesh networks from IoT devices and uses 6lowPAN (IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks). When creating the protocol, the developments and protocols used in systems such as Amazon Alexa Smart Home, Apple HomeKit and Dotdot of the Zigbee alliance will also be used.

The project will facilitate communication through smart home devices, mobile apps and cloud services while defining 'a specific set of technologies IP-based Networking for Device Certification ».

As such, companies claim compatible devices must support at least one technology (but not necessarily all) to be compatible.

With an open source approach, the working group plan to leverage existing technologies for the Smart Home, including Amazon's Alexa Smart Home, Apple's HomeKit, Google's Weave and the Zigbee Alliance's Dotdot data models to bring the protocol to market faster.

The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate protocol development and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers more quickly.

Because the goal of the project is to build a universal connectivity standard, focusing on IP, the foundation of the Internet is an obvious choice.

By adopting IP, the four main actors in this project have selected a solid foundation on which to build your new connectivity standard.

And with the increase of network security as the main objective, the working group will also gain access to a number of security methodologies developed for IP.

The reference implementation of the new universal protocol proposed in the future standard will be developed on GitHub as an open project, the first version of which is expected by the end of 2020.

If you want to know more about it About the Connected Home over IP project, you can check the details on its official website. The link is this.


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