Table of Content
- IoT Connectivity and User Adoption
- Matter Smart Home—IoT Smart Home—Matter Protocol
- Matter Certified Products
- Lower Costs and Improved IoT Development
- IoT Application Layer
- IP Protocols
- Matter Controller and Border Routers
- Matter Bridges
- IoT Smart Home Security
- Matter Smart Home Devices
- Primary Categories of Matter Smart Home Products
- Matter Smart Home Implementation
- Matter Standards Tools and Platforms
- Benefits of Matter Smart Home Ecosystems
- Krasamo’s IoT Developer Services
IoT Connectivity and User Adoption
The IoT Smart Home market currently offers numerous products that work with various different platforms, protocols, and applications, making the Smart Home setup and maintenance a cumbersome activity that requires effort and time. Therefore, users have been slow in adopting IoT Smart Home products due to decreased satisfaction or frustration produced by the complexities of incompatible protocols, specifications, and stacks. A better user experience (UX) with more flexibility and seamless connectivity is required for massive household adoption—and for greater customer satisfaction.
Matter Smart Home—IoT Smart Home—Matter Protocol
Google, Amazon, Samsung, and others have unified efforts to develop a new open-source protocol standard to solve these problems: an IP-based mesh network that can connect devices right out of the box. Developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) (Zigbee Alliance) and licensed by Apache, Matter is the new connectivity protocol that provides an IoT compatibility standard that simplifies and harmonizes IoT technologies to create connected environments. Hundreds of the most innovative companies are part of the alliance and are working collaboratively to develop this industry-unifying, royalty-free, open-source connectivity standard.
New products are being built for Matter Smart Home to provide seamless connectivity and improve reliability, security, and interoperability in an open ecosystem without locking consumers.
Matter Certified Products
IoT products certified with Matter Smart Home standards (formerly Connected Home Over IP-CHIP) will have the approval seal essential for marketing these products in the following months. As a result, consumers will have the freedom to choose. They won’t have to keep guessing and gambling when purchasing IoT products, as compatibility with their IoT ecosystems and current devices such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistance, Amazon’s Alexa, and others will be ensured. In addition, Matter Smart Home Standards components are certified to have interoperability.
Lower Costs and Improved IoT Development
IoT developers currently cope with building products that integrate with each ecosystem interface, where many protocols and specifications create longer development time and inefficiencies when deploying IoT products. However, building products that work in the Matter Smart Home will improve IoT development speed and reduce costs by using an open-source code with exceptional specifications.
Adapting your current IoT products to work with this technology will provide reliability to your customers, increase the speed of your operations, and reduce the time to market. IoT developers will focus more on innovating, creating differentiated IoT products, connecting with their customers, and saving time with many different protocol implementations.
IoT Application Layer
IoT devices connect using IoT protocols such as Wi-Fi or Thread, and then implement the application layer to deliver interoperability and connect across multiple compatible networks. Matter is a single application layer, a common language, that can run on IoT devices on any networking technology, leaving the flexibility to the manufacturer to choose their networking technology. Matter is built over Internet Protocol (IP) networking, thus supporting a wide variety of network transports.
IP Protocols
The first release of Matter will run on top of Wi-Fi (for high bandwidth and power) and Thread (low power and low bandwidth) network layers, as well as Bluetooth for device set-up (commissioning). It is extendible to cloud, with all specifications built on top of existing proven standards. In addition, Matter is suitable to run over other IP-based protocols such as cellular and broadband.
Matter Controller and Border Routers
Matter Smart Home controllers are flexibly built into any device, hub or panel, mobile operating system, mobile app, and interface to administer and control the network and devices, bringing a simplified user experience. The Matter controller app or device vendor app can automatically set up any device without installing a new app. IoT devices can continue using the manufacturer’s mobile app for specific features and simultaneously connect with multiple platforms (multi-admin feature), mobile apps, and brand ecosystems.
The controller app communicates directly with new devices via BLE as commissioner for onboarding into Wi-Fi or Ethernet networks and provides secure credentials. The Matter protocol also supports Thread as a network layer to onboard and link Thread devices using a Thread Border Router. Thread routers can be built into other Smart Home devices.
Devices onboarded in the network can interact with other devices using the Matter application protocol. The Matter protocol provides responsive local communication and allows IP devices to connect to their applications and ecosystems through cloud connections with proper remote access.
Matter Bridges
Although building native Matter devices is ideal, IoT devices using other technologies can also communicate to the Matter Smart Home network using Matter compliant bridges that work with other protocols and allow interaction with all other devices. In addition, many existing IoT Smart Home hubs will become Matter certified bridges that will control devices from the WI-FI network.
Bridges can be built into other devices to reduce the number of physical devices in the Matter Smart Home. Matter protocol adopted a data model, interaction model, and device definitions from Dotdot by Zigbee.
IoT Smart Home Security
Two of the obstacles in adopting IoT Smart Home products are the struggle consumers face when configuring IoT devices as well as the risks to their personal security and privacy. Matter Smart Home standards have a comprehensive and robust security architecture based on practices such as Xero Trust and secure by design, testing and authenticating measures on every device as well as providing over-the-air updates.
Matter Smart Home can onboard IoT devices with built-in components without manually entering the network password or installing security layers to provide first-class security. The Matter protocol is securely tested with cryptographic algorithms such as the ECC-NIST-P256 and AES-CCM-128.
The Matter Smart Home project is developing and testing blockchain (distributed ledger) technologies to verify IoT devices, vendor IDs, other metadata, and firmware updates, accessed through cryptographic tests, assuring compliance with the Matter protocol certifications.
Matter Smart Home Devices
IoT development of Matter Smart Home devices will provide a superior user experience with products that work across platforms and communicate with other consumer devices seamlessly. Many consumer devices will be initially supported by Matter protocol and are in production for the first round of certifications. However, additional Matter protocol specifications are in development to suit new devices and commercial product applications.
Primary Categories of Matter Smart Home Products
- HVAC Controls—AC units and thermostats
- Lightning and Electrical—luminaries, bulbs, plugs, and controls
- Appliances
- TV and Entertainment Systems
- Safety and Security—security systems, detectors, and sensors
- Blinds/Shades
- Access Control—door locks and garage doors
- Infrastructure Devices—controllers, access points, and bridges
Matter Smart Home Implementation
The Matter protocol provides reference implementations of specs tested and validated in practice by Matter’s community of contributors, such as supporting multiple transports (WI-FI and Thread), testing, and security of interactions. Those implementations benefit IoT developers by speeding their work and helping create high-quality code.
Matter Smart Home’s implementation-first approach focuses on specs that work in real-world use cases. You can check commits in the GitHub repository and build compilations that support Thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth (BLE).
Matter Standards Tools and Platforms
Matter is building tools designed for automation, testability, and integration with IoT developers’ testing processes for building Matter certified products.
Krasamo’s IoT developers can help clients adequately validate their product test cases and implementations to meet the Matter Smart Home standard requirements to upgrade their IoT products and bring them to market.
Benefits of Matter Smart Home Ecosystems
- Developer-friendly to simplify IoT development
- Increases compatibility and interoperability with other Matter certified products
- Lowers the barriers to consumers with an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box experience
- Can be deployed in other platforms and ecosystems
- Can be implemented on devices with low memory requirements and compute power
- Provides strong security within the IoT architecture
- Reliable and cohesive solution built on top of proven technologies
- Simplicity through one protocol stack and one SDK to interact with many ecosystems
- Enables new device types in the IoT Smart Home
Krasamo’s IoT Developer Services
- Development of firmware applications
- IoT app development—user experience (UX) design
- IoT architecture design
- IoT open-source development agnostic mindset
- Compliance with Matter specifications and certification process
- IoT data pipelines and analytics
