Home Devices communicate with each other

Home Devices communicate with each other

It’s the protocol that the Nest Learning Thermostat, Nestcam home-security ip camera, and Nest Protect smoke-detector use to communicate with each other. That’s what enables a Nest Cam to record video if the Nest Protect detects smoke in the home, and the Nest Thermostat to shut down your ventilation system in the same circumstance.

Now that it’s part of the Works with Nest program, third-party developers and manufacturers can incorporate the protocol into their products, so they can exchange messages, too—with each other and with Nest products.

Why this matters: Most connected-home systems rely on a central control panel to coordinate everything. In order for your lights to come on when you open a door, for example, the door sensor (or a smart door lock) sends a message to the control panel, and the control panel then sends a message to your smart light.

A smart door lock (or sensor) that speaks Nest Weave will send a message directly to a smart light that speaks Nest Weave. No control panel is needed, and the latency between the door opening and the light coming on is greatly reduced (Nest claims end-to-end latencies of less than 100 milliseconds, even on a large network).

Nest Weave will run over Wi-Fi or Thread, the IPv6 protocol that Nest Labs is developing with Samsung, Big Ass Fans, and a number of other companies. All that’s needed is an 802.15.4 radio. Each device on the network acts as a network extender independent of your Wi-Fi router. So even if your router can’t reach every corner of your house, your lock upstairs can still talk to the light in your basement—though it might depend on having a device or two in between.


But in an embargoed briefing a few weeks back, Nest Senior Manager Greg Hu told me it will be very easy for consumers to add Nest Weave devices to the network using the Nest app on their smartphone or tablet. “The Works with Nest promise,” Hu said, “is Buy it, plug it in, and it works.”

The beauty of a mesh network like this is that it doesn’t depend on your router. You’ll still need a router when the network clients need to reach the cloud—or when you want to control them from the cloud—but the mesh network itself won’t fail if you lose your Internet connection. And because Thread is a self-healing network, it will automatically rebuild itself if any device goes offline because its battery died, it was unplugged, or it just fails. And Weave devices will keep resending a message until it receives an acknowledgement that it’s been received by the target.

Mesh networks aren’t new, of course. Z-Wave devices—light switches, thermostats, door locks, motion sensor light, and more—also form a mesh network. And Z-Wave is the technology that Nest Weave will compete with most. Z-Wave has enjoyed significant success in the connected-home market, but one of the factors that have prevented Z-Wave from becoming even bigger in this space is that it’s a single-source technology. If you want to build a Z-Wave-compatible product, you must buy the chips from either Sigma Designs or the one company Sigma has allowed to become a second source: Mitsumi.

Nest Labs doesn’t make chips, but it's lined up at least four manufacturers to support Nest Weave in its silicon: Freescale, Silicon Labs, Dialog, and Qualcomm Technologies (a Qualcomm subsidiary). Manufacturers are much more apt to incorporate a new technology when they can secure the needed parts from multiple sources that are all competing for their business.
 


Nest is coming out of the gate with a strong slate of third-party partners that consumers will be more familiar with, too, including Yale locks. Yale, a Z-Wave early adopter, will incorporate Nest Wave into its new Linus deadbolt (named after the company’s founder, who invented the cylinder pin-tumbler lock in 1843).

One of the Linus lock’s key features will be a message that flashes on its numeric keypad if a Nest Protect installed in the home detects the presence of dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. Using a magnet, the lock can detect if the bolt is extended, locking the door, or if it’s retracted to enable the door to open. The lock can also set a Nest thermostat to “away” mode when it’s locked (I asked how the lock would know that the resident was leaving or locking the door from the inside, but Hu demurred). The Linus lock will be available in early 2016.


Nest provided these other examples of how the third-party products can interact with Nest devices:

• August smart lock: When someone unlocks the door, Nest Cam will show an animation that can be viewed from the August app.
  
• Philips Hue LED lighting: When the Nest Cam senses motion, it will trigger the lights to turn on to fool a potential burglar into thinking someone is home. In the absence of motion, the lights can turn off to save energy.
  
• Skybell video doorbell: If the Nest Cam detects motion when everyone is away, it will trigger the doorbell cam to record a video clip. You’ll also be able to turn the Nest Cam on or off from the Skybell app.
  
• Mimo onesie and baby monitor: When your baby stirs, it can trigger the Nest Cam to record a video clip of what’s happening in the nursery.
  
• Petnet pet feeder: When your pet comes to eat, the feeder will trigger the Nest Cam to send a snapshot to the Petnet app.
  

A number of other well-known brands have also committed to using Nest Weave in their products, including Big Ass Solutions (maker of Haiku ceiling fans), Lutron Electronics (lighting controls and motorized shades), Rachio (automated irrigation systems), WeMo (Belkin’s connected-home product line), Legrand (lighting controls, multi-room audio systems, and home-theater controls), Zuli Smart Plugs, Jasco products (GE-branded lighting controls), and more. Google’s new OnHub router also supports Nest Weave.

The new Nest Cam API is available now, and Nest says the aforementioned August, Mimo, Petnet, Skybell, and Philips Hue integrations will be available this month. Nest Weave, Nest cloud services, and Nest app integration won’t be available to developers until 2016, so it might be a while before we see some of the more ambitious integrations reach the market.

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Protect the Internet of Things in the home

Protect the Internet of Things in the home

The IoT has invaded the home with fun, expensive, functional devices that are definitely personal even if they are not portable. Today's IoT home devices are premium products, yet given their practicality, they will be embraced by mainstream homeowners, renters, and even landlords. (Think about the potential synergy between the IoT and, say, Airbnb.)

Where the fun stops is in potential privacy concerns, and there's a value-added role that internet service providers (ISPs) can play in helping ensure an overall security posture for the IoT-enabled home.

Forget Fitbits and Apple Watches and think about the smart thermostat, the connected smoke detector, the digital door lock, the security system, the security cameras. Think about the Amazon Echo smart hub, Samsung Smart TVs with speech recognition, and even the pretty Philips Hue mood lighting.

Personal IoT devices, like those headline-grabbing Apple watches, use a smartphone as their connection hub. By contrast, most if not all home-based IoT equipment uses the home Wi-Fi network to connect to a cloud-based service provider. That's not universal; by default, the August smart lock talks to a phone via Bluetooth.

Some IoT devices also use Bluetooth for command-and-control. For example, you can pair an iPhone with the Amazon Echo and use it as a remote speaker. In general, however, the true hub of the home Internet of Things is the network router that acts as the DOCSIS head unit for cable or ADSL/VDSL head unit for DSL, with a few wired Ethernet ports and some flavor of 802.11 Wi-Fi in the mix.

All, or nearly all, of the home IoT traffic passes through that device. That includes telemetry sent into the cloud by the IoT devices, command-and-control pushed from the cloud to the devices (often through polling), firmware updates, and so on.

This centralized connectivity also enables the possibility for several types of mischief. Hackers might try to infiltrate the home router (which is often sitting with its default device password and either public Wi-Fi or one with an easy-to-guess password), and once on the network, get to the IoT devices. Hackers might also attack by attempting to compromise the cloud services behind the IoT and cause trouble that way.

To pick a third possibility, the cloud service providers backending the IoT products might behave in a not-very-nice way. Certainly, some have expressed fear after seeing what various smart televisions were doing with their data.

There is an opportunity for ISPs: the DOCSIS or ADSL/VDSL device is smart, and working in conjunction with the carrier's data center, it can act as a smart filter, as a kind of automated firewall that understands the customer's smart home and works behind the scenes to safeguard it.

Consider the value of antivirus/antimalware that filters at the carrier level, protecting IoT devices that truly can't defend themselves. The home router could easily detect which devices connecting to its Wi-Fi are IoT (as opposed to laptops, desktops, phone and tablets), and learn which services are allowed to talk to them.

Only Nest's server, for example, should be allowed to poll to the home thermostat to see if the consumer is home or away. Only August should be able to push new firmware to the digital door lock. Only Amazon should be able to see which commands the Echo is processing. But even in those cases, of course, the consumer should be able to block those services at their home network perimeter, confident that the IoT service can't circumvent the firewall.

And heaven only knows who should be accessing the SmartTV's microphone. Wouldn't that be a nice feature to add to the home router's control setting page – block the smart television microphone.

With the right consumer-friendly front end, the carrier-based IoT firewall could go a step further, offering the customer an inventory of active devices and the option to require discrete authorization before a new device can go live on the network.

The era of the home Internet of Things is upon us; soon, these devices will be in nearly every house, apartment, condo, and even dorm room. Carriers have a unique opportunity to guard those devices, because the IoT's customer is the carrier's customer too. That's a value-add customers would very likely embrace.

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Wi-Fi of Things : Internet of Things

Wi-Fi of  Thing  :  Internet of Things

With projections of more than 5 billion connected devices by the end of this year and growth to 50 billion by 2020, the challenges facing the Internet of Things (IoT) include a lack of standardization, security, integration, battery life, and rapid evolution. Wi-Fi, in its 16th year, is getting ready for IoT and will perhaps make the most suitable network for the technology. 

Why Wi-Fi will be the technology of choice for the Internet of Things
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IoT may be a recent buzzword, but the quest for connected things is old. Very old. Caller ID, connected Coca-Cola vending machines, M2M, smart meters, RFID, AutoID, etc. The whole appeal of connected things has been efficiency and experience. And the desire for experience and efficiency is even greater today.


We live in an experience era and have no patience. We expect 'great experience' and 'efficiency' around us. Only IoT can enable that. IoT is nothing but an intelligent and invisible network of things that communicate directly or indirectly with each other or the internet to enable experience and efficiency. Internet can connect to the World via Android TV Box

Here are some of the challenges facing the IoT, and how Wi-Fi can help address them.
IoT needs a standardized technology for connecting devices to each other or the cloud

The things (as in Internet of things) typically employ some kind of embedded technology that allows them to sense conditions such as pressure, humidity, temperature, motion, number of people in an area, etc. And then a technology allows them to connect to other things or the cloud so that they can send the information as well as be programmed.

There are many standards and proprietary solutions used for connecting things to each other or to the cloud: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Active RFID, loWPAN, EtherCAT, NFC, RFID to name a few. The choice of technology is usually dictated by the physical characteristics of the environment, such as the presence of wood, concrete, metal etc., the density of sensors, desired range, and data rates.

Among these technologies, Wi-Fi has been the most successful. It has become a ubiquitous standard of connectivity and is used in the home, enterprise, schools, hospitals, airports etc.

However, as the number of devices connected to a Wi-Fi Access Point or the distance of device to Access Point is limited, many Active RFID technologies that operate in sub 1-GHz bands are used for things too. Active RFID technologies allow a large number of devices as well as larger ranges.

To overcome these challenges, a new IEEE Wi-Fi standard 802.11ah using the 900MHz band has been in works and will solve the need of connectivity for a large number of things over long distances. A typical 802.11ah access point could associate more than 8,000 devices within a range of 1 km, making it ideal for areas with a high concentration of things. The Wi-Fi Alliance is committed to getting this standard ratified soon. With this, Wi-Fi has the potential to become a ubiquitous standard for IoT.

And, not to mention, the growth of the IoT has just started. We are rapidly evolving, but there is a lot of unknown. Unknown applications, unknown devices, and unknown use cases. The best way to proceed is using one common worldwide standard for technology and application programming interfaces that can get these devices to talk to each other and to the cloud without networking infrastructure upgrades.

Standardization and implied interoperability is one of the main reasons Wi-Fi is very popular, and that's another big reason that it is suitable for the IoT.
Needs of security and protecting privacy in the borderless world created by IoT are real

IoT creates a borderless world where things talk to the cloud. Network or device administrators may not even realize the firmware or operating systems of these things or the cloud applications that these things talk to. In other words, protecting privacy and preventing malicious activity will be a challenge.


One may not even know what other information these things will send or how that information is used. Too many cloud apps, too many APIs, too many hackers out there. For security and policy enforcement, SDN is the most natural solution, and in the last couple of years, a good effort has happened in the industry around SDN (software-defined networking) enablement of Wi-Fi. With SDN, Wi-Fi enables unified policy management as IoT device traffic can be scanned and secured at the network entry point.
Without energy efficiency, maintenance overhead of things will be too substantial

As most of these things need to be portable or self-sustaining, stretching battery power or harvesting energy is almost a must. The battery change cannot be required every few days or weeks. And batteries  should be preferably using solar like Solar Lamp (โคมไฟพลังงานแสงอาทิตย์,โคมไฟโซล่าเซลล์ หรือ ตะเกียงไฟฟ้า) or Solar Light, wind, thermal, and other energy mechanisms.

Significant efforts in the industry have been going on for many years to make Wi-Fi low power, and many vendors now specialize in low-power Wi-Fi chipsets. Additionally, 802.11ah helps with lower-power consumptions and most recent innovations around backscatter Wi-Fi can enable a no-power or battery-assisted low-power Wi-Fi.

At this point, Wi-Fi appears to be the most suitable choice for the IoT as it has the potential to address all the challenges. I would love to hear your feedback about this.

Cr.Network World