Designing a Matter Hub and Communication API for the Local Server-based Smart Home

With the rapid proliferation of generative AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, and interoperable smart home standards like Matter, the smart home market is entering a new phase of development. The Matter standard, in particular, enables local control, allowing smart home services to function even without an internet connection. However, to leverage a wide range of AI services, including generative AI, user voice commands and data related to smart home devices must be transmitted to the cloud, which undermines the local control feature inherent to the Matter standard. To address this issue, this paper proposes a smart home system architecture that utilizes both a Matter Hub and a local AI server. We introduce the design of a Matter Hub that can control smart home devices and communicate with a local server, along with various APIs to facilitate data exchange between the hub and the local server. Experimental tests are conducted to evaluate the performance characteristics of the Matter Hub when used with a local server. Experimental results demonstrate up to a 320% improvement in device response times when using a local server. Additionally, extended performance tests reveal performance improvements of 321% on average, with up to 1492% in maximum response times and 320% in transactions per second (TPS) compared to cloud-based systems.