RighGravity: A Cost-Effective Improvement to Your Current Smart Home Management System

RighGravity is a smart home device management system that is designed to augment existing WiFi management systems, bringing new features, and reducing cost.  RighGravity is the only management system that is designed to preserve network operators' investment in the management system they already have in place.  This preserves the network operator’s investment in hardware, software, processes, and historical data, while bringing the most modern features and capabilities to their network management.

RighGravity has a complete set of features, and can be used as a standalone system in a greenfield deployment.  Or, through its flexibility and configurability, it is able to work as part of  a wide variety of other management systems, filling in the gaps in a network operator’s existing management system.  RighGravity can be configured to work with OpenSync, prplMesh, EasyMesh, OpenWiFi, and Automatic Configuration Server (ACS) systems using TR-181, TR-069, or TR-369.  RighGravity works on an extremely wide range of hardware, including chipsets from Broadcom, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Airoha, and MaxLinear.

RighGravity is designed as a hybrid system, able to operate independently based on local processing, but also able to leverage cloud resources if they are available.  

RighGravity can be added to and support devices other than WiFi APs.  It can be used to develop innovative use cases, including personalized energy management, advanced security solutions, and enhanced user experiences.  

RighGravity is provided royalty free, and its optional cloud can be run in a private cloud, public cloud, or on cloud services provided by Righ.  RighGravity is appropriate as part of the solution coming from chipset manufacturers, device manufacturers, network operators, and Communication Service Providers (CSPs).

How it works

The block diagram shows RighGravity when it is used in conjunction with an existing management system.  Two key aspects of the architecture are particularly unique among industry WiFi management solutions:

  • It can support zero, one, or multiple clouds.  Because RighGravity can implement a complete set of features just with local processing, neither the existing WiFi management system nor RighGravity require a cloud connection.  However, if a network operator desires the observability and sophisticated AI/ML learning capabilities that a cloud system can provide, RighGravity can operate connected to its own cloud, in parallel with the original WiFi system and original cloud connection.

  • RighGravity’s flexibility is based on the “northbound” abstraction layer for providing protocol adaptation, and the “southbound” abstraction layer for providing chipset adaptation.  Other key ingredients for RighGravity’s flexibility are modularity (features can be enabled individually), decoupled control and data planes, and standard APIs based on MQTT and RESTful interfaces.

Benefits

RighGravity offers a range of benefits to the WiFi ecosystem:

  • Preserves investment in hardware and software while bringing legacy systems up to date with the most modern features and capabilities

  • Reduces risk by maintaining legacy network operation methods for existing features

  • Reduces cost due to cloud communication, processing, and storage, by performing more tasks locally compared to existing cloud based systems

  • Reduces risks associated with cloud outages and overloads, for example following regional power failures, through local independent control 

  • Simplifies maintenance by allowing incremental in-place updates, without having to replace the entire firmware image

  • Provides extensive monitoring and management capabilities to the cloud, supporting customer service and network wide intelligent actionable insights

  • Includes an extremely capable self-healing engine that continuously monitors the network, performs predictive health checks, and identifies and solves network problems in real time

Deployment

RighGravity is easy to deploy

  • CPU Usage:  5% on extender, 20% on gateway (based on 750 MHz CPU)

  • Memory and Flash:  10MB flash 80MB memory on extender, 30MB flash and <150 MB memory on gateway

  • Operating Systems:  OpenWRT, RDK-B, prplOS, any Linux environment with kernel version >3.3

  • Licensing:  offered royalty free, only costs are integration and support  services if desired

  • Support:  Righ delivers unparalleled porting and support efficiency based on years of supporting OpenSync, prplMesh, and other WiFi systems