The Thread Group and the Open Connectivity Foundation have agreed to make OCF’s application layer compatible with Thread, the IoT networking protocol initially developed by Alphabet’s Nest.
OCF provides a standard and a reference implementation framework (IoTivity) residing at the application level in the OSI model. OCF can run over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or Bluetooth LE. Now, the two consortiums have agreed to make sure OCF runs over Thread too. The idea is to ensure that “consumers will have smart home devices that seamlessly work together out of the box, regardless of their brand or function”, according to Grant Erickson, the Thread Group president.
This cooperation is good news for IoT which needs interoperability. It remains to be seen if the AllSeen Alliance will enable their AllJoyn framework to run over Thread too. Microsoft, a member of the AllSeen Alliance, added support for AllJoyn to Windows 10 and joined the Thread Group a year ago with the idea of making it run over Thread. As far as we know, this has not happened yet. Instead Microsoft joined the OCF a few months ago, and now we see plans to make it run on Thread. AllJoyn currently supports Wi-Fi, Ethernet, serial, and Power Line (PLC), and there is no reason it couldn’t support Thread.
OCF has recently announced the addition of 31 new members, including Bose, Comcast, Fujitsu, Somfy, Sony and Tata, the total number getting close to 200. They have also announced the OCF 1.1 draft specification with enhancements for the Core Framework, Security, Smart Home Device, and Resource Type. The have added support for Smart Locks and a number of sensors that can be usually found in wearable or robot devices: Acceleration, Altimeter, Clock, Geolocation, Height, Movement, Sleep, Smoke, Three Axis, and Weight.