Arrayent Internet-Connect System™ Overview

The Arrayent Internet-Connect System is a turnkey communication service that connects your products to smartphones, tablets and web browsers at low additional BOM cost and ensures a simple DIY installation process.

Arrayent Internet-Connect System solves the six Internet-connect design challenges:

Low BOM cost. To achieve high volumes, the hardware BOM cost adder has to be low. Arrayent’s product architecture pushes communication processing into the Internet-cloud, ensuring the lowest cost end point and residential gateway hardware possible.
Just works installation. For an Internet connected product to sell successfully, it must install with little or no consumer intervention. Arrayent’s Internet-Connect Server automates consumer NAT firewall traversal, eliminating the need a fixed IP address (typically $15/month added cost to the consumer), configuring port settings, a VPN server/ firewall, and reducing your customer support load. See Arrayent customer LiftMaster’s easy product installation process video here.
Security. Arrayent makes use of industry standards and best practices. For the endpoints, most RF SoCs support 128-bit AES encryption in hardware. 128-bit AES encryption is Payment Card Industry, PCI, compliant and used by Wi-Fi WPA2. For cloud to cloud, Arrayent uses SSL between its Connect-Servers and your web application server. IBM Internet Security Services team has audited Arrayent’s system and deemed secure.
High reliability. High communication reliability is essential to ensure that your brand’s reputation is maintained. Arrayent’s software is hosted on redundant servers mirrored at physically separated data centers to ensure system uptime greater than 99.9%.
Scalability. Consumer product volumes can run in the hundreds of thousands to millions of endpoints. The Arrayent System has been designed from the very beginning to scale linearly.
6. Efficient web/smartphone application development. Embedded system designers typically program 8-bit MCU based products using low-level embedded system coding style. At the other extreme, web application developers program at a web services level of abstraction. It is rare for a single developer to be proficient at both ends these software programming abstraction extremes. The challenge for web application programmers is that low cost consumer products are usually powered by 8-bit MCUs that don’t have the computation horsepower to support web application server overhead. Arrayent customers solve this problem, by connecting a home area network transceiver (e.g. Wi-Fi module or a Sub-1GHz SoC) to their product’s internal serial port. The product can then wirelessly connect, via a Wi-Fi access point or Arrayent reference design residential gateway, to Arrayent’s servers in the cloud. There, Arrayent applies its patent pending Web Services Virtualization technology to create a “virtual product” instance in the cloud that is web server enabled. It is to this virtual product instance web application developers to communicate using Arrayent’s RESTful and JSON API interfaces. The Arrayent Internet-Connect server takes care of messaging back down to the physical endpoint in the consumer’s home. Bottom line is that Web/smartphone application programmers productive and end product costs as low as possible.

The Arrayent Internet-Connect System satisfies these six system requirements, and is delivered in three components: Arrayent Residential Gateway (used for non-Wi-Fi networks), Arrayent Internet-Connect™ Server, and an RF LAN of your choice.

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The Arrayent Very Low Cost Residential Gateway™

The hallmark of the Arrayent System is the lowest cost residential gateway available today. By moving communication processing tasks to Arrayent Internet-Connect Server, the Arrayent residential gateway reference design can be implemented with lowest BOM cost possible. The current eBOM cost for a sub 1GHz RF gateway is at $4.93. Because the Server does the heavy communication processing, the Gateway costs less than one quarter the cost of traditional gateway implementations on the market today.

There is no perfect LAN for all applications, so the Arrayent has designed its gateway to be LAN agnostic. The gateway is portioned into two parts. One is the IP side, which includes Arrayent’s proprietary automatic NAT firewall traversal algorithms. The other half is the LAN communication processor side. The two sides communicate through an API Interface. The Arrayent Residential Gateway has been extended to support customer proprietary RF protocols. ZigBee and Z-Wave gateways are on the Arrayent technology road map.

Arrayent has software as a service (SaaS) business model, and does not build or sell the RF modules or Residential Gateways. It licenses these reference designs to customers at a modest cost.

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Arrayent Internet-Connect Service™

The Arrayent Internet-Connect Service is the heart of the Arrayent service offering. It delivers Internet “dial tone” to your products located in a home or small office setting. It manages the transactions among product endpoints (e.g. garage door openers, thermostats, irrigation controllers, biometric monitoring devices, door locks, blinds, appliances and life style products), Internet services (e.g. alerts, schedules, weather, voice, digital content and more) and your web and smartphone applications (to unlock a door, view entry history, receive alerts.)

The Server is designed to support hundreds of thousands of end point devices at very low operating cost. Two choke points that vex database backed website implementations are SQL transaction processing and managing TCP/IP connections. SQL database servers can only handle 100 to 1000 SQL operations per second. When this operational limit is reached, system performance degrades catastrophically. When properly designed, a modern Internet server can handle 10,000 to 50,000 TCP/IP connections. For a server system to scale beyond that limit, the servers must be interconnected in a cluster to share data. Clustering raises costs beyond the obvious cost of the servers alone. The bottom line is that classic database backed website systems were not built to support Internet of things volumes. The Arrayent Internet-Connect Server is architected like a communication switch, and is not limited by SQL transactions or TCP/IP connections. This is the same modern architecture that E-Bay, Facebook and Google deploy because it provides superior reliability, scalability and high availability.

Web services (HTTP, XML) has become the de facto communication standard on the Internet. These protocols evolved from a PC orientation, and are too heavy weight for low-cost, 8-bit CPU based, consumer products. Arrayent’s patent pending Virtualized Web Services Interface enables your web application developers to program to a virtualized version of the product in the home (a proxy) as if it had a web server on it. This means that your web application developers don’t have to become expert embedded system programmers, eliminating schedule and development time risks. And you don’t have to place expensive hardware (CPU and memory) into your product to provide a web application server. Your software team stays productive. Your customers enjoy low cost, reliable products.

Arrayent provides both a Java API and a Web Services interface. This flexible approach gives you multiple options to integrate your application with other web applications, so that you can achieve a better balance between the performance of application and the cost of development (for example, the web service SOAP or REST interface is compatible with any development environment used.) The core messaging server functions (messaging and presence information) are separated from application specific requirements. This architecture keeps the core server simple, high-performance and more reliable. It will also help to achieve more cost effective design especially when application requirements may change.

Arrayent Server is designed to ensure easy plug-and-play installation. Arrayent’s gateway and server work together to automatically handle NAT address and port re-mapping, NAT/firewall traversal, and dynamic IP address changes. The result is that there is no networking knowledge required by the consumer to install, and the product does not get return. See Arrayent customer LiftMaster’s easy product installation process video here.

System reliability, robustness, and high up-time are Arrayent’s top design priorities. Endpoint device data are stored redundantly through a distributed data replication technique. Data replication dramatically reduces the possibilities of data loss and also reduces the cost to maintain for these servers. Device data in the Arrayent Internet-Connect Server are stored redundantly in each server node of the cluster through distributed replication. This approach reduces the chance for data loss and Server operating cost. Server availability is much higher as there is not a single database point that must be accessed. Any peer server can handle any transaction. Redundant servers are located in geographically separated co-locations, and if one co-location fails the service rolls over to the other co-location. Since 2007, Arrayent has had 99.9% uptime. This accomplishment is the direct result of this Arrayent’s high reliability server architecture.

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RF LAN Agnostic

There appears to be no convergence on which home area network will dominate. Arrayent technology has been designed to work seamlessly with any local area network. The system has already been extended to support customer proprietary wireless (900MHz) protocols, Wi-Fi and Ethernet. ZigBee and Z-Wave are on the Arrayent product road map.

Arrayent has developed a proprietary 900MHz protocol called Zamport™ that has been optimized for full-house range (5,000 square feet) and the small office setting. The protocol enables products to reliably communicate via a robust star topology network to Internet based applications connected to the Arrayent Internet-Connect Server. Reliable RF communication is ensured by algorithms originally developed through hostile environment sensor network research and is reliable and robust enough to ensure TCP/IP level connection quality. It supports long battery life through Arrayent’s energy aware algorithms; typical radio subsystem on-time battery life is 12+ months powered by three AA batteries.

Arrayent’s Zamport code requires less than 16 KB of memory which is ten times smaller than an embedded Linux solution, or ZigBee stack. As a comparison, consumer Wi-Fi routers are typically Linux based systems; consumers already complain that they have to reboot their Wi-Fi routers once or twice a month—an intolerable frequency for a garage door opener or a smoke detector.

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