Smart Home Networking Technology

One of the well-known brand for smart home network technology in United States are INSTEON. It uses a dual-band approach radio-frequency and power line. Video below shows how they works.

Why INSTEON is more reliable than other networking technology?

• Uses separate hub to control the application instead of only rely on the modem router itself. A separate hub function to only transmit signal to applications installed in the house. Assuming that the transport layer using Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the connection between the hub and applications will have a higher value of ssthresh. Thus, this give the capability of 16 millions devices to connect in a network.

• Uses Mesh topology. Signal can be transmitted from many applications simultaneously and can withstand high traffic. Also uses peer-to-peer network. When one of the application fails, it will not affect the transmission of others.
• Devices can connect in two ways either using Radio Wave of power line. Using power line will reduce interference compare with Radio Wave, interference such as distance between hub and devices, and other radio wave like phone signal maybe an obstacle. This may used up more transmission time need when interference happens.
• All devices in the network act as two-way repeater. The protocol using hop count to optimized every device to decide connection. Furthermore, error detection and automatic error correction were also used in the protocol.

How the message being transmitted?

Example 1:

A Max Hops show how many time a sender or repeater re-transmit a message based on the repeater. Once a sender had transmitted a message, the repeater will listen to the message and re transmit to the next time slot.

Example 2:

In timeslot 1, Sender transmit message, repeater 1 and recipient  is listening. In timeslot 2, Sender and repeater will re-transmit to check whether there is another devices while recipient still listening. Until timeslot 3, sender and repeater 1 is in listen state means there they had meet the max hops then recipient show acknowledgement to the message sender has transmitted. Finally, recipient re-transmit the acknowledgement and pass through repeater 1 to re-transmit again to reach sender that this packet has confirmed receive by the recipient.

Finding

Although INSTEON provide reliability, but it does used up unwanted resource such as repeater to re-transmit message from source to destination. Each device function as a repeater in a network, thus if a network contain 50 devices, all the 50 devices help to re-transmit a same message from source to destination even-though the distance between source and destination only need one repeater is sufficient to transmit message from source to destination.