Zigbee Alliance rebrands as ‘Connectivity Standards Alliance’, introduces ‘Matter’

At the same time, it revealed a second brand, ‘Matter’, to cover the project called ‘CHIP’ for Project Connected Home over IP.

“The newly developed Matter mark will serve as a seal of approval, assuring that any object built on this standard is reliable by nature, secure by design, and compatible at scale. Members of the Alliance have taken an open-source approach to the development and implementation of this new, unified connectivity protocol,” according to the Alliance, adding: “The Alliance will continue to develop Zigbee technology and will retain the Zigbee technology brand.”

Matter will define an application layer (diagram right) – initially supporting Wi-Fi and Thread network layers for core operational communications, and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to simplify device commissioning and setup.

It has a home on GitHub, which describes seven components (diagram below) within the application layer:

• Application
  High order business logic of a device.
  For example, an application that is focused on lighting might contain logic to handle turning on/off the bulb as well its colour characteristics.
• Data model
  Data primitives that help describe the various functionalities of the devices.
  The Application operates on these data structures when there is intent to interact with the device
• Interaction model
  Represents a set of actions that can be performed on the devices to interact with it.
  For example, reading or writing attributes on a device would correspond to interactions with the devices. These actions operate on the structures defined by the data model
• Action framing
  Once an action is constructed using the interaction model, it is framed into a prescriptive packed binary format to enable being well represented on the ‘wire’
• Security
  An encoded action frame is then sent down to the security layer to encrypt and sign the payload to ensure that data is secured and authenticated by both sender and receiver of a packet
• Message framing and routing
  With an interaction encrypted and signed, the message layer constructs the payload format with required and optional header fields – which specify properties of the message as well some routing information
• IP framing and transport management
  After the final payload has been constructed, it is sent to the underlying transport protocol for IP management of the data

CSA has more than 350 member organisations across 37 countries. Its other brands include Smart Energy, Green Power and rf4ce.

Zigbee recently made an appearance on Mars, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory choosing it to link Ingenuity to Perseverance.

Websites

• CSA
• Matter
• GitHub

See also: Si Labs’ wireless devices support Matter end products