Smart home take-up needs standards to converge
Graham Martin, EnOcean Alliance
Smart home and consumer applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) are seen as huge growth markets. Numerous related products and solutions already exist today however, although these solutions achieve enormous comfort and security gains as well as energy savings, an important component is missing: the user acceptance. The convergence of standards and technologies resulting in seamlessly connected, worldwide solutions will change this situation, write Graham Martin, the chairman of the EnOcean Alliance, and Tobin Richardson, the resident and CEO of the ZigBee Alliance.
The smart home’s intelligent networking capability currently founders on the fact that the automation solutions use different standards for individual disciplines, are manufacturer-specific and, above all, wired solutions can be upgraded only with a great deal of effort. As a result, consumers find it difficult to choose the most suitable system from a highly fragmented assortment.
Approach of collaboration
However, the industry is beginning to rethink its approach. Increasingly, suppliers are pursuing the goal of dissolving the boundaries between products, standards and disciplines and combining them into an integrated solution. This willingness to work together enables open systems that integrate the products of different partners. Customers will be able to choose from a wide range of different devices communicating with each other across different standards. As a result, the user doesn’t need to worry about the technology used by the single components anymore yet can benefit from seamless, plug and play connectivity in the smart home – a great path to high user acceptance.
Combined benefits
The collaboration of the ZigBee Alliance and the EnOcean Alliance is the latest example of this development. The two organisations, both leading in the wireless industry, join forces to create an open, global specification for energy harvesting wireless communication, which combines the benefits of EnOcean energy harvesting wireless technology with the worldwide ZigBee 3.0 unified communication standard.
Energy out of air
EnOcean energy harvesting wireless technology is derived from a simple observation: where sensor data resides, sufficient ambient energy exists to power sensors and radio communications. Harvestable energy sources include motion, indoor light and temperature differentials. These ever-present sources provide sufficient energy to transmit and receive radio signals between wireless switches, sensors, actuators and controllers − sustaining vital communications without cables and batteries by using miniaturised energy converters instead.
Intelligent interoperability
ZigBee 3.0 is a newly ratified standard, which opens the door to a new era of improved communication and interoperability between products used in applications ranging from connected home, intelligent buildings and smart cities. It unifies previous application-specific ZigBee device descriptions, behaviors and profiles into a standards convergence that supports all Internet of Things (IoT) product development needs. It is the industry’s most complete set of definitions for IoT device interoperability, operating in the worldwide IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz standard.
A smarter, greener world
The combination of EnOcean energy harvesting solutions with ZigBee 3.0 will result in new opportunities for creating intelligently connected buildings and developing other solutions across a variety of applications in the IoT and consumer arena. The integration of both technologies allows the development of simple, plug and play solutions and seamless cooperation of industry leading standards. This goes hand in hand with predicted trillions of sensors to deliver the data for the IoT, which can be powered by energy harvesting instead of being limited by wires or batteries. The cooperation of the ZigBee Alliance and the EnOcean Alliance is exactly what the market demands: an interoperable, sustainable and worldwide communication from the sensor to the cloud.