Connected Home Panel

December 6, 2012, Wireless Communication Alliance, Santa Clara, CA—The WCA held their year-end round-up meeting with a set of presentations from various industry participants. The meeting focus was on the technologies to enable the intelligent, connected home.

Michael Palma from IDC offered a number of applications that the intelligent connected home could support. These apps include presence detection, security, safety, monitoring, appliance control, energy management, entertainment, and home control. For the appliances, the apps could manage demand response, track and manage maintenance and performance, and enable remote operation.

The various devices and their infrastructure will be available soon, and the user interfaces are getting better. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on standards for how these devices will communicate. The potential channels include WiFi, HomePlug, Zigbee, Powerline, MOCA, and many others. None of the existing standards is dominant. The hope in the industry is that some service provider will bring all of the issues together.

The different communications modes seem to depend upon the service provider and there are distinct regional differences. Some buildings, like apartments, are a challenge for the wireless technologies, while wired connections have to use existing wires. One possibility is to use phone lines, which are already in the walls for most of the communications. The data rates for most of the apps are fairly low, so bandwidth is not an issue.

Fabrice Hoerner from Qualcomm addressed some of the connectivity issues. He admitted that there are many challenges ahead, but the market has been a long time coming. Technology has developed the building blocks for connected devices and machine-to-machine communications that are based upon the person-to-person technologies.

One example of a device-to-device data transfer is a motion sensor that can turn off non-used functions when no one is home, and activate the security system. The device needs to communicate with itself and with the outside world for functions like remote diagnostics, etc. Automation is necessary to keep the costs of operation under control and reduce the inventory for repairs, as well as identify appropriate repair parts before the truck rolls. The outside communications could also work with smart thermostats to manage temperatures and control the systems with accompanying utility rates.

The intelligent home needs to facilitate device to cloud and device to human communications to be considered useful. This communications will require multiple parts; a connectivity hub and smart gateway, the cloud, and the individual devices. The overall system will be fairly complex to address all the possible apps. The various categories—security, health, monitoring, life management, etc.—each has different specifications and requirements for communications.

The underlying home network is the key and will have to manage multiple communications streams and formats. Some functions will use cell phone technologies, others will use short-range wireless or wired connections. The various technologies include 802.11ac, 3G, LTE, Powerline, or low power WiFi. The Powerline systems use low energy for data transfers. HyFi is a hybrid technology that takes its abstraction layers from IEEE1905.1, and can support 100 Mb/s. Extenders via HomePlug or other technology solves two issues, coverage and interoperability. The remaining issues are congestion and bandwidth for some functions. A solution is to pre-manage bandwidth allocation and priorities and add a cell backhaul for increased diversity and reliability.

The smart gateway will enable multimedia on multiple screens through DLNA connectivity. The gateway will have to coordinate many devices and their functions. The challenges are being addressed in the following ways: enabling the home network, translating functions through device abstraction and data exchange, reducing the software footprint, developing applications frameworks, and understanding that only some of the apps need a user interface. Most of the apps will be headless. The various layers will need to define appropriate technologies.

The proliferation of proprietary standards can be addressed by merging multiple gateways. The existing standards leave too many options for implementation, so they are part of the problem. The home network is not a connectivity issue, but a service provider issue. The marketing opportunities for service providers will drive the resulting architectures, and the many use cases will drive the industry towards open standards that work.

Gianluca Viale from Renesas noted the need for smart devices and a smart core for the various functions. the issues and drivers for the industry are being held up by the lack of common standards for even the basic control functions. Most of the necessary components for the smart home already exist, and the smart home systems are emerging. The appliances are getting smarter and adding new functions.

The ability to remotely operate many devices increases their functionality and makes all of the newest features easier to implement and access. The machines just need software to run, since many appliances already have embedded microcontrollers. Adding power management, devices, connectivity, and more sensors improves the efficiency and utility of the appliances.

For example, lighting controls and thermostats could work together to anticipate impending operations, and use predictive and learning to profile normal behaviors that are coupled to environmental cues. In addition, the light and heating systems can interface with other systems to make the whole house more efficient and user friendly.

Tom Kadlee from the Homeworks Group installs the various devices in homes. They focus on security, custom installations, and system integration. Most of the security functions use WiFi or other wireless technologies. The wireless interfaces reduce installation costs at the cost of increased product prices. One problem is that the wireless systems need batteries and have RF issues in many homes.

For a whole house custom installation, they integrate standard products, a job which needs a lot of programming. When security is the base platform for other services, the existing sensors and controls make the system integration a little easier. The cellular backhaul and remote management capabilities of a security system allow local alerts and simpler user interfaces.

The challenges for the industry are in developing awareness of the capabilities of vendors and products, the existence of available infrastructure for the systems, reducing the complexity of the systems, and more education and training for the industry and users. The nature of the hub can enable tools and diagnostics, both of which are relatively non-existent, and provide a main control point for the system. It would be very nice to get standards, plug and play installations, and interoperable functionality without needing a band of programmers.