Startup to license M2M technology in the home
The company has set up a Special Interest Group (SIG) to license its Hanadu communication protocol on an accessible FRAND basis, says CEO Russell Haggar. The SIG will work to complete the Hanadu specification, support it on its path to standardization, develop propositions for particular applications and markets, and support a widespread adoption of Hanadu technology. Haggar says he expects 5 to 10 members within the first year.
The SIG will take over the development of the Hanadu specification from Xsilon, allowing offerings from multiple vendors to create a broad platform within the home in the same way as the Bluetooth, Zigbee and OpenET SIGs.
“Having worked hard to create the Hanadu concept and to develop its technology base, we are now moving on to the next level as we open out the platform to our partners,” said Haggar. “We’ve had nothing but positive responses to Hanadu from all our partners and customers throughout its gestation, and now they are working with us to build real momentum in the market for Hanadu products.”
The Hanadu architecture fits with established standards such as IP and ZigBee and works with them to extend the Internet of Things to the whole home for the first time says Haggar. Hanadu is the first connectivity technology to be developed specifically for deploying machine-to-machine (M2M) services inside the typical home.
Delivering the Internet of Things will require large-scale roll-outs of In-Home M2M services such as Smart Meter Displays, e-Health, Intelligent Homes, Assisted Living and Home Energy Management, and these services require data connections between devices which are ubiquitous, reliable, work straight out of the box, secure, low cost, deployable anywhere, unobtrusive and low power. Hanadu is the first and only technology designed specifically to meet the challenging combination of all these goals he says.
The technology has been in development since 2008 and uses the home’s electrical wiring as its communications medium, dovetailing neatly with the energy monitoring needs of applications such as Home Energy Management. Where connectivity to untethered or battery-powered devices is required, Hanadu integrates easily with existing radio technologies such as ZigBee or wireless IP.
It provides 250kbps of usable bandwidth for M2M applications, even with large numbers of nodes in a single home. Although Hanadu can use meshing to deliver traffic to hard-to-reach locations within the home, in practice it connects to over 90% of locations without this, so maximizing the network resources available to the M2M applications.
Whereas previous generations of powerline communications have focused on achieving high bandwidths over short distances for streaming connections, Hanadu has been engineered for “whole home” range, as well as extremely low power consumption and for EMC.
Xsilon’s first Hanadu-based products will be available for commercial trials at the end of 2013.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
