Using mesh topology in building a wireless home automation network

Abstract

Currently, with the advent of smart devices, our life has become more convenient – it is now easier to do household chores, track the movement of goods, etc. The development of smart devices with the advent of new wireless communication standards helped to give impulse to the unification of smart gadgets into a network, which is often used in smart homes. With this approach, there are some security problems, such as unauthorized access to devices by third parties, interference with the operation of devices, failure of routers, limiting the radius of data transfer between devices, reducing the bandwidth of devices with increasing distance between the gadget and the router, etc. This article talks about IoT technology and how I use it for home automation. The modern view of building wireless home automation networks, which allows you to solve some of these problems, involves a decentralized approach, for example, the usage of mesh-network. This article describes how mesh networking works, and lists the benefits of using it in home automation. When using mesh networking technologies such as Z-Wave or Zigbee, it is possible to link multiple devices into a «seamless» network using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. The authors reviewed the most popular technologies that use mesh network topology for home automation. These technologies increase the throughput of devices several times. It also allows you to protect devices from third-party intrusion into the system by assigning unique private keys to each device of the network, which decrypts only those packets that are intended for this device.