Implementation and Evaluation of the iHAC Hub Leveraging the Web of Things for Interoperability Between Matter and ECHONET Lite Devices

In the smart home field, it has been pointed out that interoperability between different standards is difficult due to the differences in the ecosystems supported by each device. As a new communication standard to address this issue, Matter-developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance has emerged and is gaining attention for its high compatibility with major smart home ecosystems. However, compatibility with ECHONET Lite, which is the standard adopted within Japan, has not been established, making direct interoperability between the two systems difficult. The authors have previously proposed the iHAC Hub as a system enabling interoperability between devices with different communication standards. In this study, we enabled bidirectional collaboration between ECHONET Lite devices and Matter devices by extending the iHAC Hub with Matter communication functionality. Furthermore, we introduced the concept of the Web of Things (WoT) and investigated a mechanism to express the correspondence between the iHAC Hub’s unique message format and the data structures of each communication standard using the WoT’s Thing Description (TD) format. Evaluation using actual devices confirmed that the proposed system can mediate communication between the two protocols in a short time, demonstrating its effectiveness as a method for interworking between devices with different communication standards.