Latest Smart Home technologies explained

With a bulk of latest wireless technologies got up on a bandwagon, it’s really interesting to know how they fit together. How existing infrastructure and technologies might benefit from integrating those.

Recent Smart Home ecosystem

One of a particular interest for SpartanShield ADMP is recently introduced technology, Matter. It’s an application layer protocol for Smart Home that sits on top of a physical layer protocol IEEE 802.15.4, namely on one of its implementation, Thread. Also Matter is supported on top of WiFi and Ethernet. Currently, the ecosystem is growing rapidly with a lot of vendors presenting there Matter certified devices. See our recent articles on Matter vendor ecosystem and those devices about to hit the market.

So how all those pieces, Matter, mesh-networks like Thread and traditional ones WiFi, Ethernet fit together and provide a synergy for vendors and end consumers. Let’s provide a 30K feet bird-eye overview of those technologies. Thread is a mesh-network that was very vocal on the market for recent years being a physical barrier for smart devices similar to Zigbee, ZWave ones. If you had Zigbee or ZWave Smart Home sensors like movement, door or similar then you were good to go with appropriate Gateways managing those devices. Back then Thread was in a shadow with not much devices available on the market. Hence the majority of vendors were offering Zigbee, ZWave solution. In opposite to them, there were major players like Google( NEST), Amazon(Voice Assistant), Apple(Home Kit) exploiting Thread internally in its Smart Home products. The market was fragmented along with each vendor maintaining own ecosystem.

Here comes Matter

Zigbee, ZWave have its own customer base and proven track records of deployments. Though, both of them are 2 different mesh-technologies with own ecosystems often struggling with each other for it’s customer base along with Google, Amazon, Apple serving Thread based technologies.

In order to harmonize all ecosystems and ease interoperabilities between them, there was born a Matter specification 1.0 in September 2022 and supported by major players like Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung to name a few. Thread became the default barrier for Matter along with WiFi, Ethernet as options. Zigbee Alliance became Connectivity Standards Alliance(CSA), a body responsible for Matter specification, partners network and adoption.

The value that Matter brings to the market is a harmonization of all vendors and devices capable to interoperate as a whole ecosystem. For instance, available Zigbee, ZWave devices through a Border Router can be accessible by customers who have Matter devices. For the ecosystem SpartanShield Platform can serve as a unification device management platform to provision and managing SmartHome routers that are responsible for Matter devices life-cycle and interconnected with Border routhers that manage Zigbee, ZWave devices.

Along with the Cloud Platform, there should be Spartan FogEdge services deployed on Matter Router to enable components deployment, orchestration and management via a standard protocol for Broadband and Connected Home providers. The most suitable device management protocol for such purpose would be USP(TR-369). It allows standardization accross all vendors as well as building new Edge services and products for Gateway platform Time came to make Gateway a standalone ecosystem hosting a wide range of Connected Home, Broadband products driving a new revenue streams to Operators and Service Providers.