What does Matter (formerly Project CHIP) matter?

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. Recently, Zigbee Alliance renames itself as Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) and Project CHIP as "Matter". From any perspective, it's ambitious to announce and developing such a big picture to provide an Unifying, Interoperable, Ecosystem-Flexible, Easy to Use, Secure,..etc. solution in IOT world. 

Here, I would like to share my thoughts about "Matter". 

First of all, "Matter" is not equal to Thread protocol. "Matter" is application protocol and Thread is wireless IPv6 network protocol. "Matter" can run on any TCP/UDP going through IPv6 network protocols which is not limited to Thread.

Next, let's go to some other points:

Unifying/Interoperable/Ecosystem-Flexible/Easy to Use: This is the most primitive of Matter and let's have a look at the following CHIP pyramid.

 

Basically, Matter is an application protocol and I would say it is unified/interoperable in application point of view. Since Matter can run on TCP/UDP going through IPv6, there are different physical protocols, such as Thread/802.15.4, WiFi, Ethernet, or even BLE to provide such IPv6 capability. Let's imagine you buy a Smart Home gadget which claims it's Matter certified but doesn't mention which physical network protocol it use or it just mentions using Thread protocol. I would say any generic user won't know much about how to add such gadget into an existing Smart Home system. 

My point is Matter might unify application protocol but interoperability might be still an issue if different Matter devices use different physical network connection. Don't mean to add confusion but you must know you still need something like border router to forward or routing everything together.

For different ecosystems such as Google Nest and Apple HomeKit, I still don't see a clear picture that Matter can work to each other smoothly and seamlessly. Hopefully, I will see how different ecosystems work together soon and how easy-to-use of this.

Secure: since Matter runs on TCP/UDP going through IPv6, it's no problem to leverage modern security practices and protocols such as TLS/DTLS. However, most of IOT devices don't use secure boot and secure element to provide hardware/firmware protection. From my personal point of view, secure boot and security vault, such as Silicon Labs EFR32 series 2 chip provides, would be necessary to provide complete protection not only from protocol side itself.

Federated: No single entity serves as a throttle or a single-point-of-failure for root of trust but I think this is more related to Thread Protocol instead of Matter (maybe I am wrong).

Low Overhead: The alliance claims the protocols are practically implementable on low compute-resource devices, such as MCUs. From personal perspective, the minimal RAM/Flash footprint and MCU computing power are still larger than other low power wireless protocols such as Zigbee and Z-Wave.

Pervasive: The protocols are broadly deployable and accessible, thanks to leveraging IP and being implementable on low-capability devices.But, I would say current low-capability devices is not such low capability as you imagine now. Current SOC for Thread/Matter is very powerful from my point of view. For your reference, Zigbee and Z-Wave devices still can run on 8051 based MCU until today.

In the end, this is about benefiting/improving user experiences for anyone using IOT/Smart Home gadgets. Matter reveals a respectful vision to developing and achieving it. Hopefully, we can see it soon on the market.