Amazon, Apple, Google and Zigbee set to create an open standard for smart home devices

Amazon, Apple, Google and Zigbee organized a joint project Connected Home over IP, which will develop a single open standard based on the IP protocol and designed to organize the interaction of smart home devices. The project will be supervised by a separate working group created under the auspices of the Zigbee Alliance and not related to the development of the Zigbee 3.0/Pro protocol. The reference implementation of the new universal protocol proposed in the future standard will be developed on GitHub as an open project, the first release of which is expected at the end of 2020.

The development of the standard will take into account the technologies used in the currently released products of Amazon, Apple, Google and other members of the Zigbee alliance. Support for a common universal standard, not tied to the solutions of a particular manufacturer, will be provided in future device models of the companies involved in the project. IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (former Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian also announced their readiness to join the working group.

Thanks to the future standard
developers will be able to create smart home control apps that run on hardware from multiple manufacturers and are compatible with multiple platforms, including Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri. The first specification will cover operation over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy, but support for other technologies such as Thread, Ethernet, cellular networks and broadband links may also be provided.

For Google Workgroup Use Transmitted two open source projects openweave и Openthreadalready used in smart home products and using the IP protocol for communication.
openweave is an application-layer protocol stack for organizing communication between multiple devices, between a device and a mobile phone, or between a device and a cloud infrastructure using asynchronous communication channels and the ability to work on top of Thread networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy and cellular networks. Openthread is an open implementation of the network protocol Thread, which supports building mesh networks from IoT devices and uses 6lowPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks).

When creating a protocol, developments and protocols used in systems such as Amazon Alexa Smart Home, Apple HomeKit and Dotdot data models from the Zigbee alliance will also be used.

Source: opennet.ru