Matter: New standard for IoT and smart home devices
Good Cooperation
© Lead Image © Nelli Valova, 123RF.com
The new vendor-independent, open Matter standard for IoT and smart home devices has what it takes to revolutionize the market. We describe its basic principles and explain how Matter works.
Too many cooks spoil the broth, people say, and this is frequently true of the smart home sector, too. KNX has been an established standard for building automation for decades. Over 400 manufacturers support this standard because it is considered highly flexible and extremely efficient. At the same, unfortunately, it is also expensive and complex. This explains why manufacturers keep on developing closed-source solutions that are simpler and cheaper, but only work correctly in their own ecosystems. Those systems are primarily suitable for small setups with 100 or fewer devices, while KNX is ideal for extensive projects with several thousand devices.
Matter is a new standard that sets out to harmonize IoT and smart home devices from various vendors. More than 280 organizations have already joined forces to support it. Matter v1.0 was released in early October 2022, and the current 1.3 version arrived in May 2024.
Strictly speaking, Matter is a connectivity standard that's based on existing technologies such as WLAN, Ethernet, Bluetooth LE, and Thread. Matter breaks down devices into different categories; check out Table 1 for an initial overview. With every release, Matter adds new categories.
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