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UPnP in home automation and the technology trend?

It seems that big companies like Microsoft and Intel are promoting UPnP technology

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to standardize networking of various home devices. However, I do not know many products supporting this standard. Especially in this forum, I rarely see people discussing it. To me, its TCP/UDP/IP based protocol stack looks too heavy for many home devices. Is UPnP still a viable technology? In a bigger picture, can someone shed some light on the technology trend of home automation area, for technologies such as X-10, Z-Wave, ZigBee, Lonworks?

Thanks,

-EH

Reply to
eyqhuang
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If you delve deeper you will find Intel and Microsoft are promoting _DIFFERENT_ UPnP "standards". Intel initially supported the same UPnP standard as Microsoft and most others but then pulled out and started its own proprietary version of UPnP. Whatever it's about, it's not about standardization. I think it should be renamed as nqUPnP (not quite Universal Plug and Play).

Z-Wave is fundametally flawed and unlikely to succeed. Multiple controllers don't play well together. The low number of max hops limits the size of a network. The time required for signals to traverse the network renders ACKs useless.

ZigBee is only standardized at the lowest level. It's unlikely that ZigBee devices from different manufacturers will use the same high level protocols so don't expect interoperability.

Lonworks is too expensive to garner much market share. AFAIK it's also proprietary.

HomePlug has f>It seems that big companies like Microsoft and Intel are promoting UPnP

Reply to
Dave Houston

The othe big gotcha is that UPnP is really only useful for PC level products, or fairly powerful smaller devices. It's a large and complex standard that depends on a lot of high level functinality like having to have a full XML parser and a few other XML related technologies. That's just not going to happen in a light switch any time soon probably. So it's not very universal due to pure size and complexity if for no other reason.

------------------------------------- Dean Roddey Chairman/CTO, Charmed Quark Systems

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Reply to
Dean Roddey

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