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The Ultimate Smart Home Compatibility Solution | Symmetry Blog

Anuja Upale in Blogs on June 24, 2020

About Anuja Upale

Anuja Upale is an Engineer with a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Electronics & Telecommunications from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, and a Master’s in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Maryland. With eight years of hands-on experience in the tech and electronics industries, Anuja serves as an excellent technical consulting resource for design engineers. Specializing in wireless technologies, including Cellular, Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, LoRa®,and GPS–Anuja develops insightful reference designs, application notes, white papers, and product kits to support the advancement of innovative technologies.


Smart home market leaders, Amazon, Apple, Google and the ZigBee Alliance have joined forces to develop a new Working Group called “Project Connected Home over IP”, that aims to offer a unified connectivity protocol that will support secure and cross-compatible smart home devices for consumers. Together, their mission is to offer an open source approach, building upon Internet Protocol (IP), to allow for seamless communication between smart home devices, mobile apps, and Cloud services.

Market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, the ZigBee Alliance, and more will be used to accelerate the development of the protocol. These advancements will also make it easier for manufacturers to develop devices that are compatible with popular smart home and voice services like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Google’s Assistant.


Incompatible Wireless Standards

Currently, smart home devices are being deployed using various incompatible wireless standards such as ZigBee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. While each of these standards have their own unique advantages, they also have limitations. For example, smart home Wi-Fi devices are easy to deploy and offer instantaneous IP connectivity while compromising on power consumption. On the other hand, ZigBee and Z-Wave are power efficient, but require a hub to connect to smartphones. Additionally, although these technologies operate within the same frequency spectrum, 2.4 GHz, they are still not compatible with one another.


The Solution

The Project Connected Home over IP intends to target the issue of incompatibility by building upon Internet Protocol. The main advantage offered by IP is that it is widely deployed in homes and offices. Therefore, its data should be able to flow seamlessly across different kinds of networks. Some of the technologies supported are Wi-Fi, Thread, and IP implementations over BLE. It is also likely to support Ethernet, cellular and broadband. The preliminary specification is expected to launch in late 2020.

 

Interested in developing your own smart home product? Take a look at our Smart Home Technology Teardown to view our product offerings.

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Anuja Upale in Blogs on June 24, 2020

About Anuja Upale

Anuja Upale is an Engineer with a Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Electronics & Telecommunications from Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, and a Master’s in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Maryland. With eight years of hands-on experience in the tech and electronics industries, Anuja serves as an excellent technical consulting resource for design engineers. Specializing in wireless technologies, including Cellular, Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, LoRa®,and GPS–Anuja develops insightful reference designs, application notes, white papers, and product kits to support the advancement of innovative technologies.

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