This repository guides through the setup of a testbed that is meant to capture traffic from devices using the Matter protocol. Both Thread and Wi-Fi data are captured. The testbed comprises three primary components, namely:
- The Hub System
- Home Assistant Server
- Matter Devices
The hub consists of two single board computers, in this case two Raspberry Pis v4. One Raspberry Pi acts as a cube and another acts as a cubelet. The cube acts as the main Wi-Fi access point for the network whilst the cubelet houses the necessary hardware to sniff Wi-Fi, Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) traffic. To be able to capture traffic, the cubelet requires the following hardware:
- nRF52840 for Thread Traffic Capture
- nRF52840 for BLE Traffic Capture
- Wi-Fi interface capable of monitor mode for Wi-Fi capture
For convenience, we provide two scripts to assist with the setup of the hub system. There are two scripts which help in setting up the cube and cubelets. The setup script for the cube creates the Access Point for the cube whilst the cubelet setup script helps to configure the hardware and software required to do traffic capture. The setup script for the cubelet can be found here and the cube script can be found here.
The setup script for the cube creates an Access Point for the network,
the configuration file can be found here.
The sniffing routines are systemd services which capture the traffic and store in a database.
Sqlite is used to store the captured traffic.
The database is created in /media/splicecube.db.
For flexibility, we use MongoDB to store the Matter traffic which is transmitted over Thread and Wi-Fi. BLE traffic scanning is used to monitor the device during the commissioning process. MakerDiary provides a guide on configuring setup for Thread & BLE. We also provide scripts which help with the automatic capture of Matter traffic and storing such traffic in a MongoDB. Furthermore, the cubelet setup scripts copies over the required extensions needed for Wireshark to capture Matter traffic.
For the smart home platform, we use Home Assistant. Specifically, we use a version called Home Assistant Supervised running on a Linux/Debian host operating system. The setup instructions can be found here. We chose to use Home Assistant supervised since other installations such as Home Assistant OS, whilst easy to install, does not provide a flexible OS layer.
To pair Matter devices to the Home Assistant platform, we recommend using the Home Assistant SkyConnect dongle which can be used to establish a Thread network. The Home Assistant server will require the following add-ons to be installed:
- Open Thread Border Router
- Matter Server
The process to establish a Thread network can be found here.
To pair Matter devices, a mobile phone is used along with the Home Assistant Companion application which is available for iOS & Android. At the time of writing this guide, test devices use the same discriminator; therefore, to add multiple virtual/test devices, the discriminator value has to be changed. Details on how to change the discriminator can be found here.
If you use our work, please consider using the following citation:
@article{mangar-testbed,
title={Designing and Evaluating a Testbed for the Matter Protocol: Insights into User Experience},
author={Mangar, Ravindra and Qian, Jingyu and Zegeye, Wondimu and AlRabah, Abdulrahman and Civjan, Ben and Sundram, Shalni and Yuan, Sam and Gunter, Carl A and Khanafer, Mounib and Kornegay, Kevin and others}
}