Evaluating Thread protocol in the framework of Matter

Internet of Things is a technology which produced one of the biggest, and with most impact on the society, change in connectivity and automation solutions. It has a lot of new features and advantages, but also has its constraints. For this purpose, many standard have been developed, and IoT solutions designed. A Home Automation system is an application of IoT. It consist of IP-enabled embedded devices connected to the Internet using IPv6.The technology improved when IETF designed 6LoWPAN as a interface to link IPv6 to IEEE 802.15.4, a low-power wireless network standard Untill now, the IoT market is very dispersed with many solutions based in different standards, which make them incompatible between themselves. Appart from that, Home Automation technologies and solutions do not meet the requirements of low power, IP-based, security and friendly use. In order to profit from, and accelerate it, the IoT technology emergence, a unification of the standards used and the requirements needed by the different IoT solutions must be designed. The goal of this thesis was to study a new Home Automation standard called Matter. Matter is an application layer standard which aims to simplify the development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for the consumers, enabling communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services. As Matter was to be released in the summer of 2021 but was delayed, instead of that, the Thread architecture has been studied. Thread is, with Wi-Fi, the core of the operational communications supported by Matter. Thread is a simplified, IPv6-based mesh networking architecture developed for efficient communication between energy-constrained devices around the home. As Thread is a royalty-free but closed-documentation standard, Nest Labs developed an open source implementation Called OpenThread. This study is composed by an overview of the architecture, a detailed explanation of each layer of the stack, and a implementation of the network through OpenThread. Furthermore, some test will be evaluated to provide to the reader an introduction to some of the Thread functionalities, specially related with routing