Fairhair Alliance creates specifications to enable

PISCATAWAY, NJ--(Marketwired - Jul 11, 2017) - The Fairhair Alliance has created three draft specifications that represent the organization's first steps in bringing the Internet of Things (IoT) to building automation and lighting in commercial buildings. The specifications have been reviewed externally, and the feedback received will allow Fairhair to make further enhancements.

Fairhair envisions a future where the building-automation and lighting-control industries use IoT technologies to build secure, cost-effective and scalable systems. This will enable the use of a single, unified IP-based network infrastructure in commercial buildings.

One of Fairhair's core activities is to create a set of technical specifications for a common IP-based infrastructure, based on open IEEE and IETF standards. The specifications define a set of common system services. Fairhair also supports the adoption of its specifications by existing, well-established ecosystems such as BACnet, KNX and Zigbee.

The first three draft specifications from Fairhair cover Resource Modeling, Resource Discovery, and Security. An overview of the three draft specifications is available in a White Paper published on the Fairhair website at http://bit.ly/2tYCIlJ .

As an alliance of leading companies from the lighting, building automation, semiconductor and IT industries, Fairhair enjoys a wealth of relevant expertise. Even so, it was recognized that the draft specifications have been created by a relatively small group of contributors. Therefore, Fairhair decided to benchmark the scope and direction of its work by opening up to a selected group of external companies, organizations and university groups, who were asked to review the draft specifications.

"Fairhair was very pleased to receive valuable feedback on our draft specifications from a number of industry experts and organizations," said Dee Denteneer, Chair of Fairhair's Technical Working Group. "A number of reviewers asked for clarification, specifically for the security solution and the level of interoperability targeted; we will follow up with a number of white papers on these topics. There were additional suggestions to make the meta-data framework more flexible by including the concept of linked data and to better integrate implementation efforts into the work plan of the alliance; these suggestions are now subject of study in the technical working group, and we expect recommendations to be made in our next members' meeting."

As well as working to finalize these three specifications, Fairhair is also working on a number of additional topics, and scoping potential contributions for eventing and group operation.

About the Fairhair Alliance

Fairhair is an alliance of leading companies from the lighting, building automation, semiconductor and IT industries that aims to facilitate the Internet of Things (IoT) for commercial buildings. Fairhair envisions a future where the building-automation and lighting-control industries use IoT technologies to build secure, cost-effective and scalable systems. This will enable the use of a single, unified, common IP-based network infrastructure in commercial buildings.

Fairhair will collect market requirements and use these to develop a set of technical specifications based on open IEEE and IETF standards. The Alliance has liaison agreements with relevant organizations -- such as BACnet, KNX, OpenAIS, Thread and Zigbee -- to promote and support adoption of the Fairhair specifications.

For more information, please see: www.fairhair-alliance.org .