With the improvement of the quality of life, the demand for home automation is also increasing. This demand facilitates the research and development of varieties of home automation technologies such as Z-wave, Zigbee, Insteon, X10 and so on. A New emerging industry is forming. Plenty of home automation products have been sold in the market. The fact, that different technologies are often not compatible with each other, also means if one of those technologies has particular advantages, it will be possible for it to reach the mass-market and become the common standard in this industry. In my blog the attention has been put on Z-wave technology. To evaluate the success of Z-Wave standard, I am going to analyze it based on two aspects: market and technology.
Home Automation Market
As mentioned in previous section, in order to have a mass-market for home automation, some issues should be addressed, including cost, energy, installation complexity and functionality.
Different from other technologies, Z-wave is clearly targeted at home control application. Its single application determines that Z-wave chip needs simple structure and less memory. Therefore, the cost of Z-wave chip is rather low compared to the others. Home control application also requires the transmission of tiny amounts of data. With very short transmit times and efficient design, Z-Wave nodes can easily be powered from a battery, with a long lifetime.
Z-Wave based systems are easy to install and use, and allow products from all members to interoperate seamlessly between multiple home control applications and multiple vendors.
Z-wave technology
Z-wave protocol supports mesh network structure which is able to covers large area. More advantages of mesh network are its “self configureing” and “self healing” functions as mentioned in previous section. Its protocol pattern insures the success of data transmission via ACK frame. To secure the data transmission and keep hackers out of the building, the security model has been embedded in the new generation of Z-wave chip.
Among all the advantages of Z-wave standard, its features of low cost and low energy are the most attractive, compared to other standard. However, on the other side it also implies low data transmission rate, which limits the applications of Z-wave standard. For industrial environment requiring large data transmission, Z-wave standard is not a good choice. However, I think that its advantages such as the convenience, low cost and low energy waste will make Z-wave successful in the home automation market.
