Design Goals

An ideal IoT application technology would satisfy the following goals:

• Flexible enough to be considered relatively “future-proof”
• Automatable without requiring extra hardware or internet access
• Defined as an open standard with at least one open-source reference implementation
• Simple enough that can be implemented on highly-constrained devices
• Secure, honoring the principle of least privilege.
• Suitable for residential, commercial, and industrial environments
• Include proper support for groups, scenes, and smooth transitions (where appropriate)

Splot is an exploratory attempt to bridge these requirements into a single cohesive technology and application protocol with the following goals:

• Secure, low-latency monitoring and control of (potentially constrained) networked devices
• Elegant support for scenes, groups/rooms, and smooth transitions
• Expressive and reliable device-to-device automation

In addition satisfying these goals, the SOM was designed, to the extent practical, to express a superset of functionality commonly provided by other existing IoT protocols, making it reasonably efficient to monitor and control non-SOM-based using a SOM-based API. This feature allows for the straightforward implementation of adaptation layers and enables cross-protocol automation.