The difference between IoT smart home and traditional smart home

Smart home advantage introduction

The necessity of home intelligence

With the development and changes in the socio-economic structure, family population structure, and information technology, people have put forward higher requirements for the safety, comfort, efficiency, and transparency of the home environment. At the same time, more and more homes require that home products not only have simple intelligence, but also require the entire system to be simple, convenient, easy, and secure in terms of function expansion, extension, and service. Obviously, our home life needs to change.

The difference between IoT smart home and traditional smart home

In the traditional sense, smart homes are generally considered to bring about an improvement in the quality of life. In fact, the IoT-based smart home is changing these views. The most significant changes are practical, convenient, and easy to integrate. There are various kinds of electrical appliances in every household. Whether it is a smart refrigerator, an air conditioner, or a traditional light, television has always been working independently because of different standards. From a system perspective, they are fragmented. Chaotic and disorderly, it is not an organic, organized whole. As the owner of the family, the time cost, management cost, and control cost of these disorganized appliances are usually very high and unnecessary.

The emergence of wireless Internet of things technology has brought new industrial opportunities to traditional smart appliances and smart homes. Through it, various appliances in the home can be organically organized in a convenient and wireless manner to form a complete system. Seamless perception and complete management. This previously unimaginable and challenging application has become easy, convenient and very interesting once it is connected using wireless IoT technology. These applications are not merely an improvement in the quality of life, but they can be seen as a basic requirement of a modern family.

Compared with IoT smart homes, traditional smart homes are not easy to expand, have low flexibility, poor compatibility, high upgrade costs, and high maintenance costs.

Various wireless smart home comparative analysis

Common smart home technology introduction and comparison

Although the concept of smart home has emerged early and market demand has always existed, but for a long time the development of smart homes has been subject to breakthroughs in related technologies and has not been widely used. The current smart home control technology in the market is described as follows:

Wired way

In this way, all control signals must be connected in a wired manner, and the signal lines on the controller side are more scary. However, it is also very difficult to troubleshoot problems. The disadvantages of the wired method are very prominent. The wiring is complicated, the workload is large, the cost is high, the maintenance is difficult, the networking is not easy, and the scalability is poor. These shortcomings eventually led to wired smart homes that only stayed at the small-scale pilot stage and could not be quickly promoted on a large scale.

Wireless mode

Wireless systems used in smart homes need to satisfy several features: low power consumption, stability, and easy extension of networking; as far as the transmission speed is clearly not the focus of such applications.

At present, there are several wireless methods that can be used in smart homes:

Bluetooth: A radio technology that supports short-range communication (typically within 10m) of the device. It can exchange wireless information between devices including mobile phones, PDAs, wireless headsets, notebook computers, and related peripherals. However, this technical communication distance is too short, and it belongs to point-to-point communication, which is not applicable to the requirements of smart homes.

In addition, it should be noted that Bluetooth has recently introduced the 4.0 standard. This new standard adopts a low-power design, and the communication distance also reaches the 2.4G wireless signal range. However, the defects are still obvious, including security, networking capability, and anti-jamming capability. Not enough, no network self-healing function. The leakage of Bluetooth is very common. The network size of the new standard cannot exceed 300, and Bluetooth is easily interfered.

WiFi: In fact, it is the other name of IEEE802.11b. It is an industry term published by an organization named "Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA)" and translated into "Wireless Compatible Authentication". It is a short-range wireless transmission technology capable of supporting Internet-access radio signals within a few hundred meters. Its biggest feature is to facilitate people access the Internet anytime, anywhere. However, the disadvantages are obvious for smart home applications, such as high power consumption, poor networking, and low security. So although wifi is very popular, it only plays a complementary role in smart home applications.

315M/433M: These wireless RF technologies are widely used in vehicle monitoring, remote control, telemetry, small wireless networks, industrial data acquisition systems, wireless tags, identification, non-contact RF and other places, and some manufacturers have introduced them into smart home systems, but due to Its weak anti-interference ability, inconvenience in networking, reliability in general, confusion in standards, and low security, the application effect in smart homes was unsatisfactory, and it was widely used and was eventually abandoned by mainstream manufacturers.

ZigBee: Zigbee is based on IEEE802.15. However, the IEEE only deals with low-level MAC layer and physical layer protocols. Therefore, the Zigbee Alliance has expanded the IEEE to standardize its network layer protocols and APIs. ZigBee is an emerging short-range, low-rate, low-power wireless network technology that is mainly used for short-range wireless connections. It features low complexity, low power consumption, low speed, low cost, ad hoc network, high reliability, and high security. It is mainly suitable for applications such as automatic control and remote control, and can be embedded in various devices. In short, ZigBee is a cheap, low-power, ad hoc short-range wireless communication technology.

Understanding of smart home in the context of internet of things

An important feature of the Internet of Things is that it can be quickly deployed on a large scale and it can operate stably for a long period of time. This feature requires that our home products must have wireless, seamless, green, safe, and reliable capabilities. From these basic capabilities, traditional The so-called smart home products obviously can not meet the requirements of the Internet of Things.

Initially, ZigBee's intended application areas include consumer electronics, energy management, health care, home automation, building automation, and industrial automation. With the rise of the Internet of Things, ZigBee has gained new application opportunities. The most widely used network edge of the Internet of Things is the sensor or control unit. These are the most basic, core, and most widely used unit cells forming the Internet of Things, and ZigBee can coordinate communications among thousands of tiny sensor-driven units. And these units need only a little energy to transmit data from one network node to another through radio waves in a relay manner, so its communication efficiency is very high. The low power consumption, anti-interference, high reliability, easy networking, easy expansion, ease of use, easy maintenance, and rapid large-scale deployment of the technology conform to the requirements and trends in the development of the Internet of Things. From a technical point of view, the applications of the Internet of Things and ZigBee technologies in smart homes, health care, and industrial and agricultural monitoring are highly integrated. Compared to other wireless technologies, ZigBee is investing, building, and maintaining. The advantages of standardization (International HA Standards), etc., will surely gain wider application in the field of IoT smart home.