2021
April
20

The Open Ecosystem of Thread and Project CHIP - Advantages for the Commercial Smart Building Market

By Jorg Kennis, Neovate Innovation Partners

[Note: Project CHIP is now known as Matter]

With the Project CHIP (Connected Home over IP) standard development in progress, and the first wave of products based on this standard expected to arrive on the market by the end of the year, interest is growing within a large number of markets and industries. Not only the consumer market, but also the commercial and industrial markets are following and contributing to the developments, and with good reasons. 

Project CHIP, a working group within the Zigbee Alliance, will bring with it a number of unique new advantages for the IoT space that until recently were unprecedented in the commercial building market or only achievable at very significant levels of investment in time and resources.

We know that there are exceedingly varying levels of complexity when it comes to IoT needs for commercial building applications. Some need to be able to analyze usage data, allow for the dynamic allocation of workspaces and integrate with company-specific IP-based cloud solutions. Thread and its Commercial Extensions were specifically designed for these needs and the standard was therefore selected by many commercial grade building automation standards like DALI, KNX, OCF and BACnet as their primary low-power IP-based wireless mesh networking technology. 

Recognizing Advantages of Scale
We know that many technologies that found their origin in the consumer space are very suitable for commercial building applications as well. We have seen this happen in the past, with Wi-Fi being a primary example. Wi-Fi started in the consumer domain and later became ubiquitous in the commercial world as well. Being able to use the same technologies obviously leads to major advantages in economy of scale, with production capacity of components going up, prices coming down and having a large selection of manufacturing sources without being tied to a limited number of suppliers.

Until recently, benefiting from this overlap between the consumer and commercial worlds was not really achievable when it came to IoT and building automation, specifically at the level of integration and multi-vendor compatibility with multiple consumer-originated ecosystems. 

Fairly complete and advanced ecosystems for home automation exist today, offering various levels of complexity in interfacing with AI or touch based assistant devices creating an attractive ecosystem of devices that have many applications across the commercial domain. 

Opening Up to Unifying Ecosystems
Despite the scale of the consumer space, there are some challenges. Most consumer home automation ecosystems are usually centered around a particular device or ecosystem vendor’s protocols and interfaces. Control devices (e.g., voice assistants, apps, smart displays, etc.) are produced by, or based on the technology of, one specific manufacturer. As those technologies or protocols are not generally open or licensable, this makes it challenging for commercial systems to integrate most off the shelf smart home devices, without requiring those device vendors to make special accommodations. A further challenge is that many smart home integrations are done in a cloud-to-cloud manner, which may not be well suited to the needs of commercial network management. This means that the options to develop specific custom solutions or add-ons in-house are limited.

This is about to change with the advent of Project CHIP. Project CHIP was developed by a large number of consumer electronics and component manufacturer companies who are members of the Project CHIP Working Group within the Zigbee Alliance. 

Within the Project CHIP initiative, companies like Google, Apple and Amazon contributed market-proven technologies such as with the ultimate goal of coming to a unified standard. Demonstrations of Project CHIP implementations are already offered as an open-source solution for all interested parties.

Thread’s IP Basis as a Foundation
CHIP stands for “Project Connected Home over IP” and this makes immediately clear that the basis of the standard will be the ubiquitous Internet Protocol. As Thread was specifically developed to be fully IP-based, it does not come as a surprise that it was chosen as the low-power, self-healing mesh networking technology, complementing Wi-Fi as the supported networking technologies for Project CHIP.

Thread is based on the proven IEEE 802.15.4 low-power radio technology, and because of its IP-foundation, it does not require a manufacturer or ecosystem specific bridge or hub to translate traffic to and from the rest of the network. All that is needed is a Thread Border Router function that can be part of a device such as a smart speaker or a cable modem, comparable to built-in Wi-Fi functionality.

Project CHIP will Benefit Commercial Building Markets
The new unified Project CHIP standard coupled with Thread brings a number of characteristics that are specifically of benefit to the commercial market:

• Specifically of interest for commercial building applications: Project CHIP is an open standard that allows for the creation of in-house developed control panels, voice products, touch display dashboards, smartphone and tablet apps or any other form of user interface interaction that might be desired for a specific application. Such devices and apps might even be combined with “off-the-shelf” interface products like smart speakers, offering previously unimaginable levels of flexibility.

• Project CHIP will end the need to support and maintain compatibility with multiple popular voice assistants and ecosystems. One SKU based on one standard will now be usable with all ecosystems that will embrace Project CHIP, greatly increasing the number of available IoT devices for commercial applications that require some form of flexibility.

• Project CHIP will allow the mix-and-match of various voice assistants, smart speakers and touch-based smart displays. No longer does a choice for one specific ecosystem need to be made up-front, which liberates from tie-ins and greatly increases choice.

Bridging Project CHIP to Legacy Products
Currently, a number of widely popular proprietary and semi-proprietary product portfolios exist such as for smart lighting. Many of these are based on non-IP technologies like Zigbee Pro/Zigbee 3.0, and hence will not be directly compatible with the Project CHIP standard. In order to give these products the possibility of being used in an Project CHIP eco-system, the Project CHIP specification will include guidelines for a bridge device that can act as a translation gateway between the non-Project CHIP devices and the Project CHIP standard. This means that a Project CHIP smart speaker or app can operate and control these bridged devices as if they were native Project CHIP devices. This provision gives both manufacturers and end users who have invested in existing products and technologies some headspace towards a transparent and bridge-less future, without making these products directly obsolete. 

The Dawn of a Unified IoT Future
As we have seen, Project CHIP is an exciting development for the commercial and smart building world. It bridges the gap between consumer and professional applications and offers a choice in products, flexibility in eco-systems and options for in-house development and customization that were not available before. With Thread as its low-power IP-based mesh networking foundation, Project CHIP is destined for a future that will impact not only the consumer market but will be of extreme value to the commercial building market as well.