The concept of the "smart home" is becoming increasingly important: all devices in the household should be intelligently networked. The home control system behind this not only ensures convenience, security and assistance for residents, but also actively influences energy consumption and optimises consumption costs, for example.

In practice, however, the lack of interoperability between different technologies and products from competing manufacturers still poses a major challenge when it comes to smart networking.

The approach taken by many manufacturers of networking individual devices via a central instance (broker), which is connected to the manufacturer's cloud, instead of among themselves, often does not meet the residents' need for protection or the general concept of the "Internet of Things": in principle, every device should be able to communicate directly with every other device, taking security requirements into account. Furthermore, a product as the central instance today determines which devices can be used in the home. The lower protocol layers used here include 6LoWPAN, ZigBee, Z-Wave, KNX, EnOcean or BlueTooth, which are standardised by various manufacturer cooperations. Some standardised protocols such as MQTT are used for the basic process of sending and receiving. The broker manufacturer decides which messages are ultimately sent and which protocol defines the process for sending and receiving.

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