New Thread Wireless Home Networking Protocol Vows Security, Low Power

A group of semiconductor and product companies representing a disparate connected devices alliance -- from Freescale Semiconductor, Samsung Electronics and Silicon Labs on the semiconductor side to Big Ass Fans and Nest Labs in the product camp -- announced the formation of the Thread Group Tuesday. The Thread Group’s charter is to steer adoption of Thread, an IP-based wireless networking protocol that promises to improve security, reliability and ease of set-up of connected devices in the home. Other founding members of the Thread Group are ARM and lock company Yale Security.

Thread is designed to address “critical issues” preventing the Internet of Things from being realized, including networking technology based on a “hub-and-spoke” model, Chris Boross, the new group’s president, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Thread is about “taking a fresh look at mesh home networking and looking at how people interact with those networks,” he said.

Using IP as a networking protocol rather than relying on Wi-Fi or another network protocol provides a common networking layer for all connected devices -- including smartphones, tablets and PCs -- to talk to each other, Boross said. Wi-Fi is “great technology for sharing users’ home Internet connections for devices,” he said, but it requires an access point and is reliant on that access point to function. “If the access point goes away for any reason, so does your whole Wi-Fi network,” he said, unlike Thread, which uses peer-to-peer mesh networking where “there’s no single point of failure” and devices aren’t dependent on a single source to keep the network alive. “If you want your light bulb to talk to your light switch, or vice versa, you're not reliant on a device in your home that’s always powered to keep that network alive,” he said. That results in a more robust network and allows for more “interesting use cases where the more devices you add the better your network coverage gets, and the better your reliability gets,” he said.

Boross didn’t address what Google’s role is in Thread, noting only that Thread was in the works prior to Google’s purchase of Nest for $3.2 billion earlier this year. The Thread protocol is hardware-, processor- and operating system-agnostic, said Boross, who holds a technical marketing position at Nest Labs.

There’s a sense of urgency to the group’s plans to establish Thread in the market. Sujata Neidig, vice president-marketing of Thread Group, told us the Thread specification is currently being developed and that “a lot of work has been put into it,” with input from Thread Group founding members. The group’s purpose is “not to continually modify and update and redefine but to take it and deploy as quickly as possible,” Neidig said. Bug fixes aside, which will be addressed and updated, “as far as future version, we don’t plan on having anything in the near-term future,” she said.

Plans call for applications to go to prospective member companies late this year, with a certification process to be released during the first half of 2015, Neidig said. In exchange for what Boross and Neidig called typical industry alliance fees, member companies will receive documentation they need for product development. They didn’t disclose the fees of the tiered membership program.

On why the Thread Group is launching now, Boross said the industry has been “changing recently and picking up momentum,” and it’s entering a “new era of connected products and services.” Thread member companies “shared our concerns” about “what was on the market” and what could fulfill the requirements Thread has laid out, he said. “It was a group decision to kick off Thread to produce this new networking protocol,” he said.

Wireless networking protocols that could be directly affected by a successful Thread advance include ZigBee and Z-Wave, which Boross called “similar in deployment.” Thread is not competing with Wi-Fi or ethernet, Boross said, saying those networks will co-exist in the home and talk to each other through bridge products. One of the “signature design goals” of Thread is that “every device can behave as a hub and talk to its peers if they're within range,” he said.

Thread is also billing itself as an efficient protocol that will improve the user experience in terms of battery life. “We optimized Thread’s networking protocol to enable products to ship with very, very good battery life,” Boross said. He said adding and removing devices can be done in a simple, secure way through Thread.

Security is one of the major talking points of the Thread Group. “We have a very secure method for adding and removing products from the network” in which the network ensures through an authentication process that a device being added to the network is “the device you want to add,” Boross said. That step removes some of the security weaknesses inherent in other wireless networks, he said. It’s also a Thread protocol requirement that a product is always secure, he said. Other wireless standards leave it up to product manufacturers, implementers or service providers “to run security on their network or not,” he said. It’s a stipulation that all Thread networks always have encryption enabled and all products joining a Thread network have to go through a “secure commissioning and authentication process,” he said. In addition, he said, since Thread is “the networking stack and not the application layer,” the group built technology into the protocol that “makes it easier to add security and encryption at the application layer as well,” he said. Information going over Thread networks will be “encrypted twice with two different layers with two different keys,” he said.

According to Neidig, the importance of Thread to Freescale Semiconductor is that the protocol runs on 802.15.4 radios, and various silicon and technology companies are already offering products that meet that spec. Because Thread runs on 802.l5.4 radios, it doesn’t require a hardware redesign from a product developer perspective, she said. “You can take a design that already exists in the market today and be able to change the functionality and add the capability for Thread by doing a software upgrade,” she said. Devices in the market today could theoretically be updated over the air to support Thread “as long as they have the architecture to support 802.15.4 radios."

On whether that will happen, Boross said products with 802.15.4 radios “have a really good chance that they could be upgraded to use Thread in the field if the product manufacturer wanted to do such a thing.” There’s nothing to stop them from doing it, he said.

On what impact the Thread Group hopes to have on the connected home market, Neidig said the IoT and connected home markets have “so many different implementations and none of them address all of the requirements.” Some were defined “years ago” before IoT was a concept, she said. “With Thread, what we envision is that it provides that platform and capability to build a connected home so that your home can learn from your behavior and will automatically change things without you having to get involved,” she said. “You don’t have to change the thermostat remotely because you got into your car and it will know that you're getting close to home and then be able to change the temperature,” she said. A goal of Thread is to enable a “much more connected home that works for individuals,” she said.