The Zigbee Alliance announced a new working group to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard for smart home products. The aim is to develop a secure standard that can help increase the compatibility of home devices.
Separate from the existing Zigbee standard, the new 'Connected Home over IP' project has the backing of the leading smart speaker makers Amazon, Google and Apple. They want to make it possible for more smart home products to interact with their digital assistants and give consumers a choice of which platform they use on their devices.
The Zigbee Alliance said more of its member companies are participating as well, such as Ikea, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian. Other device manufacturers, silicon providers and developers from across the smart home industry are invited to participate in and contribute to the standard.
The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, according to the statement. Building on Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
The industry working group will take an open-source approach for the development and implementation of a new, unified connectivity protocol. The project intends to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance and others. The decision to leverage these technologies is expected to accelerate the development of the protocol and deliver benefits to manufacturers and consumers faster, the group said.
Google announced that it will be contributing its standards Weave and Thread, which are built on IP and already run in millions of homes around the world. Weave is an application protocol that can work across various types of network, including Thread, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy and even cellular.
