Advantages of smart home
Source: Nanjing IOT
Date: 2012/05/03
With development of social-economy structure, household demographic structure and information technology, people have higher demands over safety, comfortbaleness and transparency.. Meanwhile. more and more families demand that household products should be with not only intelligence but also simpleness, conveniences,easiness and safety. Obviously, our household life needs to be improved with changes.
Traditionally, smart home has been regarded as something which can improve living quality. Actually IOT smart home has changed such views. The most obvious changes are pratical, convenient and easily integrated. Every family has all kinds of appliances. No matter intelligent refrigerators, traditional lights or televisions, they work separately due to different standards. From system perspective, they are fragmentry, chaotic and unordered instead of organic and organized entirety. As master of family, time, management cost and control cost brought by all these chaotic appliances are all considerable and unnecessary.
Wireless IOT technology brings new industrial opportunity to traditional intelligent appliances and smart home. All kinds of home appliances can be well organized wirelessly to form a complete system, thus seamless sense and full management can be realized in such way.Such unimaginatve and deep challeging
application becomes easy, convenient and interesting with application of wireless IOT technology. All these applications are not only improvement of living quality but also the most fundermental demands for morden family.
Compared with IOT smart home, traditional smart home is hard to expand with low flexibility, worse compability, higher cost of upgrading and maintenance.
Though there have been conception of smart home long time before and market demands are always there,application of smart home hasn’t been widely spreaded due to the limited development with related technology. Here are some existing smart home technologies in the market:
Such method should be used with wired connection. Signal cables of controller end are scary more. Once some problems happen, it will be considerably difficult to
go on with investigation. Disadvantages of wired method are hugely obvious, for example, wiring complexity, a lot of workload, high cost, difficult maintenance and networking, worse expansion etc.All these disadvantages make wired smart home just stay in the stage of small-scale pilot and unable to be promoted in large-scale rapidly.
Wireless type applied to intelligent home should be featured with low power comsumption, stable performance and easy expansion for the group of network. Transmission speed isn’t the key for such application obviously.
Bluetooth: one kind of radio engineering supporting communication between devices in short distance. It can be used for wireless message exchange between many devices such as mobile phone, PDA, wireless earphone, laptop and related external equipments etc. However, its communication distance is too short while its communication method is point to point, which can hardly meet the demands of smart home.
Moreover, bluetooth has promoted 4.0 standard featured with low power consumption, and its communication distance can reach as far as that of 2.4G wirless signal. However, its disadvantage is as obvious as still, for example ,still unsatisfied performance on safety,group of networking,anti-interference, and even worse, it hasn’t function of networking self-healing. Secret leakage always happen to bluetooth.New standard on scale for group of networking can’t be over 300 units, meanwhile, bluetooth is easy to be interfered.
WiFi: It is another name of IEEE802.11b, which is an industry terminology issued by an organization called“wireless ethernet compatibility alliance”.
It is short distance wireless transmission technology, capable of supporting radio signal inputting by the networking in hundreds of meters.The most important feature of it is convenient to connect with internet. While its defects are also obvious to see for smart home application, for example, high power consumption, worse performance on group of networking, low security.
That’s why although wifi is popular, it can just act as a supplement to smart home application.
315M/433M: These wirless RF technologies have been widely used in area such as vehicles monitoring, remote control, remote measuring,small scale wireless network, industry data collection system, wireless tab, ID recognition and non-touching RF etc.There are also some vendors bringing it into smart home system. However, such technology has been discarded by some mainstream manufacturers due to its shortcomings such as worse anti-interference, inconvenient networking group, so so reliability, chaotic standards, super low security etc.
Zigbee: The basis of Zigbee is IEEE802.15. As IEEE can just deal with low grade protocols of MAC level and physical layer, ZigBee alliance has expanded IEEE to standardize its network layer protocol and API. ZigBee is one kind of emerging wireless network technology with short range, low speed rate and power consumption, which can be mainly used for wireless connection within short range.
It embraces features with low complexity, low power consumption, low cost, low speed rate, self-networking, high reliability and security.It is suitable for areas of automatic control and remote control etc, which can be embedded with various devices. In short, ZigBee is such kind of wireless communication technology featured with cheap, low power, self-networking.
Comparative advantages between ZigBee smart home products and traditional smart home products
The most important features of IOT are rapid deployment in large scale and long-term stable running. Such features require our home products should be wireless, seamless, green, safe and reliable. From all these basic required capability, so called traditional smart home products have been out of mode in IOT era.
The very first expectation of ZigBee application fields would be consumer electronic,energey management, hygiene, home automation, building automation and industry automation. With emerging IOT, ZigBee has got new application opportunity. The most edging application is sensor or control unit for IOT network, which constitutes the most fundermental and widest unit cells for IOT, while ZigBee can realize communication between thousands of tiny sensors and linkage units, meawhile, all these units just need very few energy to transform data from one network endpoint to another one by relay way. That’s the reason why its communication effeciency is fairly high. Such kind of technology has good performance on low power, anti-interference, high reliability, easy networking, easy expansion, easy application, easy maintenance and conveniences for rapid deployment in large-scale to meet demands of IOT development. From technical perspective, IOT and ZigBee technology can be combined quite well in application areas such as smart home, health care, industry and agriculture monitoring etc. Compared with other wireless techniqure, with its advantages on respects such as investment, construction, maintenance and standardization etc, ZigBee will definitely be widely used in IOT smart home area.