When you enter a room, smart lights may turn on. Smart speakers may answer your voice command from across the room, and thermostats may adjust accordingly. Some people may consider smart homes to be magical.
However, in reality, there is a lot of technology at play, and the devices are communicating and sending information to coordinate actions. Troubleshooting devices in a smart home may require the owner to understand how the devices communicate with one another. Knowing this information may aid in diagnosing the problem and the reliability of the systems.
How Smart Home Technology Uses Your Home Network
Most smart home technologies utilize your home network, meaning the Wi-Fi router. When you press an app to turn on a smart bulb, the command goes from your phone to the router.
The quality of your home network is more important than you might think. Your router might be outdated, your house might be surrounded by other routers, causing interference, or there might be too many devices using bandwidth. As you add more devices, your network is required to manage more than just a few phones and laptops. This is why modern routers are marketed with features such as improving bandwidth and their capacity to serve many connections simultaneously.
WiFi Is Not the Only Language Devices Speak
While Wi-Fi might be the standard networking technology in your environment, smart devices might operate using other technologies. Some might depend on Bluetooth, and others might be controlled using industry-specific networking technologies.
Communications and networking technologies that are designed for low-powered devices, such as Zigbee or Z-Wave, use less energy than Wi-Fi and allow battery-powered devices, like some sensors or smart locks, to operate for longer periods of time. Furthermore, devices using these technologies could establish mesh networks, whereby each device relays messages to one another, improving the distance and reliability of the network as you add more devices.
The disadvantage is that Zigbee and Z-Wave devices almost always need a hub in order to convert their communications into a format your phone or cloud service can use. While this adds another step to the process, it can make larger smart homes more efficient and stable.
How Hubs and Controllers Streamline Smart Homes
A smart home hub is an organizational helper. It listens for commands, translates between various home automation protocols, and sends out commands to several devices at the same time. For example, when you say a voice command to turn off all the lights, the hub tells each appropriate device to turn off.
Some hubs are separate devices, and some are integrated into smart speakers or smart routers. The primary purpose is to limit the number of direct device-to-device communications. Without a hub, each device would need to interact directly with every other device, which is a recipe for inefficiency and unreliability.
In some situations, hubs also allow automation rules to run locally. This means that your lights can turn on even if your internet is down because a motion sensor detects activity. As smart home devices improve, local control is more desirable for faster response times and improved privacy.
The Cloud’s Invisible Role in Smart Homes
A good range of smart home systems use cloud computing services. Usually, home tech systems run commands and process requests via the cloud. The commands are sent to the cloud via the users’ mobile devices, and then they return to the smart home devices. This also gives you the ability to control commands from any location and gives devices advanced features like natural language processing and usage tracking.
Another advantage of the cloud for smart home devices is that companies can push updates and enhance features. The companies can also add security to improve the system, as long as they remain in business. This can also present negative aspects. In the event of a service outage or the company shutting down its service, the features of the devices become more limited and inoperative.
A number of new devices and systems offer a means to reduce reliance on the cloud to complete more activities on-site. Locally processing data enhances privacy and makes the systems more reliable. On-site data processing requires more advanced equipment. Smart home systems need a means to provide a balance between data convenience in the cloud and control security of the data, which is processed locally.
Automation Rules and Event Triggers
Smart home systems use automation features in event and condition systems. Automation features of smart home tech go way beyond controlling a device from a mobile device. Devices communicate with each other to perform a task.
The given automation relies on event conditions. The automation devices communicate with each other by sending each other signals. One automation device will trigger an event, then send a signal. The automation system will respond to the signal, running the necessary rules and responding by triggering an event.
The event trigger system will send a request to the other automation devices, and the other automation devices will respond by triggering an event. The system will then even trigger a response to the other automation devices. The timing of this system is extremely important. A small event trigger time can make the system feel unreliable or unresponsive.
Complexity in a system makes it harder to maintain. Users typically find it is easier to have a single system with reliable automation than it is to have dozens of systems with unresponsive automation systems.
The Use of Encryption in Automations
Given the circumstances of automation devices, a high level of data security is an absolute must. In a case where no security is put in place, the communication devices would be vulnerable to the outside world, and the data could be exposed during transmission or while the devices are communicating. The data that is being transferred is usually encrypted, and the encryption is designed to cover the data while allowing the devices to communicate normally. This technique is commonly used to cover and protect data, such as camera feeds or data that comes from a door lock.
Devices have an additional layer of protection known as authentication. The devices communicating in the smart hub must prove that they are a part of the smart home network and that they are allowed to send and receive automation commands. The system may, however, be weakened by the credentials being generated with the use of a weak password or the firmware of the system being outdated; thus, a system with outdated firmware would be more vulnerable to outside attacks.
Clearly, the responsibility to determine the safety of the average smart home is on the users as the customers. They must choose the right smart home devices from the right manufacturers, and the systems must have updated security features. They must use the safety add-on features provided by the manufacturers to secure their systems. In the world of automation, a high level of security is achieved by using the appropriate security automation devices.
Why Standards Like Matter and Interoperability Matter
Customers want their smart home devices to work in tandem, no matter what brand they purchase. Industry standards create the framework to ensure devices can work together, with less risk of being “locked in” to specific brands.
For the consumer, lowering “walled garden” ecosystems reduces the number of services they have. Maturing standards will allow for evermore flexible smart home configurations.
Cascade systems can respond to user input with little to no delay. The smart home should also anticipate user needs and respond to them without the user manually changing the configuration. The more you understand the systems in place, the better you will be able to integrate smart home devices without overwhelming configurations.
