Apple, Amazon, Google, and Zigbee Alliance explore new smart home standard

2020/01/03 Innoverview Read

Apple, Amazon, Google and the Zigbee Alliance have formed a new working group focused around ‘Project Connected Home over IP’, exploring the development and promotion of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to boost compatibility among smart home products.

The protocol has been designed with security as a fundamental principle.

The aim of the Connected Home over IP project, which has been built around the shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use, is to make it easy for manufacturers to develop and increase the compatibility for consumers. The project would allow communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services to define a particular set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.

The goal is to use contributions from market-tested smart home technologies from Amazon, Apple, Google, Zigbee Alliance, and others, to expedite the development of the protocol, which would complement existing technologies.

Zigbee Alliance’s board members IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify, Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian will also be contributing to the project.

In May, the Zigbee Alliance publicly announced the All Hubs Initiative to improve interoperability between IoT devices and major consumer and commercial platforms. The Alliance includes many leading IoT firms like Amazon, Comcast, Ikea, Legrand, OSRAM, Schneider Electric, Exegin, Kwikset, Landis+Gyr, LEDVANCE, LEEDARSON, Microchip, MMB Networks, NXP, Silicon Labs, Somfy, Xylem, and Yale, would make it easy for developers to easily develop, deploy, and sell smart home and IoT products across ecosystems.

(Source: IoT News https://www.iottechnews.com/news/2020/jan/02/apple-amazon-google-and-zigbee-alliance-explore-new-smart-home-standard/)