The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), an internet of things standards body, announced that it will continue the work of the Fairhair Alliance, which was aimed at IoT for commercial buildings, under the OCF name.
This integration will advance interoperability and security within the automated building and lighting IoT verticals by combining two IoT frameworks, OCF said.
OCF will maintain and improve the current Fairhair Specification while certifying Fairhair as an international standard through the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), the organization added.
The Fairhair Alliance has brought together lighting, building automation and IT companies to develop a secure onboarding framework based on IP for lighting and building control in commercial buildings.
The Fairhair Specification aims to augment the current OCF specifications, certification programs, and open source implementations, while reducing time-to-market by establishing standardized onboarding and application frameworks for building automation control and lighting control verticals.
“We are very pleased that the important work of our members and partners will now be developed further and brought to fruition by the OCF,” said Ruud van Bokhorst, secretary-general of the Fairhair Alliance.
“By coming together as a single group, we are streamlining our efforts to address today’s automated building and lighting needs with an eye to future connectivity, security, and reliability within a multitude of verticals as the IoT continues to evolve,” said John Park, executive director for the Open Connectivity Foundation.
OCF noted that its existing specs are intended for use in unmanaged networks, such as those in smart homes. Absorbing the Fairhair Specification will enable the implementation of OCF specifications in managed network scenarios, such as automated buildings, OCF said.
OCF highlighted that differences between unmanaged and managed networks include:
-In-network Complexity: Unmanaged network smart home scenarios use just a single network, while automated building and managed networks have several subnets for different purposes.
-Quantity of Devices: In unmanaged scenarios, the number of connected devices on a single network ranges from 10-100. A managed network within a building can include tens of thousands of connected devices.
-Access Control: In unmanaged networks, only a single administrator is needed with multiple users of the system. In a managed network, each device can have multiple end users with access to different parts of the system. For example, an employee will not have access to emergency lighting, but a firefighter will. The network setup of a smart building must cater to these differences, OCF said.