| # Connected Home over IP |
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| # What is Project Connected Home over IP? |
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| Project Connected Home over IP is a new Working Group within the Zigbee |
| Alliance. This Working Group plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, |
| royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home |
| products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. |
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| The goal of the Connected Home over IP project is to simplify development for |
| manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. The project is built |
| around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and |
| seamless to use. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to |
| enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services |
| and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device |
| certification. |
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| The Zigbee Alliance officially opened the Project Connected Home over IP |
| (Project CHIP) Working Group on January 17, 2020 and is in the process of |
| drafting the specification. |
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| Visit [buildwithmatter.com](https://buildwithmatter.com) to learn more and read |
| the latest news and updates about the project. |
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| # Project Overview |
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| ## Development Goals |
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| Project Connected Home over IP is developed with the following goals and |
| principles in mind: |
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| **Unifying:** Project CHIP will produce a new specification, building with and |
| on top of market-tested, existing technologies. |
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| **Interoperable:** The specification permits communication between any Project |
| CHIP-certified device, subject to users’ permission. |
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| **Secure:** The specification leverages modern security practices and protocols. |
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| **User Control:** The end user is in control of authorization for interaction |
| with devices. |
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| **Federated:** No single entity serves as a throttle or a |
| single-point-of-failure for root of trust. |
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| **Robust:** The set of protocols specify a complete lifecycle of a device — |
| starting with the seamless out-of-box experience, through operational protocols, |
| to device and system management specifications required for proper function in |
| the presence of change. |
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| **Low Overhead:** The protocols are practically implementable on low |
| compute-resource devices, such as MCUs. |
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| **Pervasive:** The protocols are broadly deployable and accessible, thanks to |
| leveraging IP and being implementable on low-capability devices. |
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| **Ecosystem-Flexible:** The protocol must be flexible enough to accommodate |
| deployment in ecosystems with differing policies. |
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| **Easy to Use:** The protocol should aim to provide smooth, cohesive, integrated |
| provisioning and out-of-box experience. |
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| **Open:** The Project’s design and technical processes should be open and |
| transparent to the general public, including to non-members wherever possible. |
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| ## Architecture Overview |
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| The Project, as illustrated above, defines the application layer that will be |
| deployed on devices and controllers as well as the supported IPv6-based networks |
| to help achieve our interoperability architectural goal. Project CHIP will |
| initially support Wi-Fi and Thread for core, operational communications and |
| Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to simplify device commissioning and setup. |
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| The Application Layer can be further broken down seven main components: |
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| 1. **Application:** High order business logic of a device. For example, an |
| application that is focused on lighting might contain logic to handle turning |
| on/off the bulb as well its color characteristics. |
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| 2. **Data Model:** Data primitives that help describe the various |
| functionalities of the devices. The Application operates on these data |
| structures when there is intent to interact with the device. |
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| 3. **Interaction Model:** Represents a set of actions that can be performed on |
| the devices to interact with it. For example, reading or writing attributes |
| on a device would correspond to interactions with the devices. These actions |
| operate on the structures defined by the data model. |
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| 4. **Action Framing:** Once an action is constructed using the Interaction |
| Model, it is framed into a prescriptive packed binary format to enable being |
| well represented on the “wire”. |
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| 5. **Security:** An encoded action frame is then sent down to the Security Layer |
| to encrypt and sign the payload to ensure that data is secured and |
| authenticated by both sender and receiver of a packet. |
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| 6. **Message Framing & Routing:** With an interaction encrypted and signed, the |
| Message Layer constructs the payload format with required and optional header |
| fields; which specify properties of the message as well some routing |
| information. |
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| 7. **IP Framing & Transport Management:** After the final payload has been |
| constructed, it is sent to the underlying transport protocol for IP |
| management of the data. |
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| # Current Status of Project Connected Home over IP |
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| The Project’s design and technical processes are intended to be open and |
| transparent to the general public, including to Work Group non-members wherever |
| possible. The availability of this GitHub repository and its source code under |
| an Apache v2 license is an important and demonstrable step to achieving this |
| commitment. |
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| The Project endeavors to bring together the best aspects of market-tested |
| technologies and to redeploy them as a unified and cohesive whole-system |
| solution. The overall goal of this approach is to bring the benefits of the |
| Project to consumers and manufacturers as quickly as possible. As a result, what |
| you observe in this repository is an implementation-first approach to the |
| technical specification, vetting integrations in practice. |
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| The Project repository is growing and evolving to implement the overall |
| architecture. The repository currently contains the security foundations, |
| message framing and dispatch, an implementation of the interaction model and |
| data model. The code examples show simple interactions, and are supported on |
| multiple transports -- Wi-Fi and Thread -- starting with resource-constrained |
| (i.e., memory, processing) silicon platforms to help ensure the Project’s |
| scalability. |
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| # How to Contribute |
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| We welcome your contributions to Project Connected Home over IP. Read our |
| contribution guidelines [here](./CONTRIBUTING.md). |
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| # Building and Developing in Project |
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| Instructions about how to build Project Connected Home over IP can be found |
| [here](./docs/README.md). |
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| # Directory Structure |
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| The Connected Home over IP repository is structured as follows: |
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| | File / Folder | Contents | |
| | ------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | |
| | `build/` | Build system support content and build output directories | |
| | [BUILDING.md](./docs/BUILDING.md) | More detailed information on configuring and building Project CHIP for different targets | |
| | `CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md` | Code of Conduct for Project CHIP, and contributions to it | |
| | [CONTRIBUTING.md](./CONTRIBUTING.md) | Guidelines for contributing to Project CHIP | |
| | `docs/` | Documentation | |
| | `examples/` | Example firmware applications that demonstrate use of Project CHIP technology | |
| | `integrations/` | Third party integrations related to this project | |
| | `integrations/docker/` | Docker scripts and Dockerfiles | |
| | `LICENSE` | Project CHIP [License file](./LICENSE) (Apache 2.0) | |
| | `BUILD.gn` | Top level GN build file | |
| | `README.md` | This file | |
| | `src/` | Implementation of Project CHIP | |
| | `third_party/` | Third-party code used by Project CHIP | |
| | `scripts/` | Scripts needed to work with the Project CHIP repo | |
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| # License |
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| Project CHIP is released under the [Apache 2.0 license](./LICENSE). |
