GTrusted

Although new IoT solutions like Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Google Home, and Thread have various stages of ecosystem development, one standard that has been around for a while is the Zigbee Alliance which has been successful in commercial deployment of low power mesh networks in commercial and utility settings.

In the past, Zigbee was very vertically oriented where everything from the mesh networking protocol to the application layer was defined by Zigbee.  At CES 2017, Zigbee announced Dotdot which is an application layer that provides a common language for smart IoT devices to communicate with each other.  What is significant about Dotdot is that this application layer can now be used by both Zigbee and other networking technologies like Thread. Since Thread mesh networking technology can support any application layer, and given the commonalities between Zigbee and Thread, it made sense for Thread to be the first non-Zigbee networking technology to support Dotdit.