EnOcean Radio Protocol (ERP)
- Matthias Kassner
EnOcean radio protocol history and variants
EnOcean Radio Protocol version 1 (ERP1) was the first radio protocol developed by EnOcean back in 2001 and used at 868.300 MHz for applications in Europe and 315 MHz for applications in the US. At this time, there were no suitable low power protocols available which is why EnOcean had to define its own protocol.
With a growing ecosystem of partners and increasing focus on interoperability and standardization, EnOcean decided to open up both the lower layer radio protocol (via ISO) and the upper layer data protocol (via EnOcean Alliance).
The ERP1 radio protocol was standardized as ISO14543-3-10 in 2012 and the corresponding specification ISO14543-3-10 : 2012 can be found here. In line with established ISO standard review requirements, this standard was reviewed and updated in 2020 and the resulting specification ISO14543-3-10 : 2020 can be found here.
The ERP1 radio protocol was defined based on 2001 technology and some of the choices that were made back then would not have been made 10 years later. Specifically, ASK (amplitude shift keying) was selected as radio transmission mode for ERP1 as it offered lower power consumption compared to FSK (frequency shift keying) back in 2001. This lower power consumption came at the cost of a higher susceptibility to noise (for instance from power supplies).
With improvements in radio technology, transceivers using FSK modulation achieved similar power efficiency as transceivers using ASK modulation. This lead to the definition of EnOcean Radio Protocol version 2 (ERP2) which is used in newer markets such as USA, Canada and Asia.
Like for ERP1, the ERP2 protocol has been standardized as ISO14543-3-11 in 2016 and the resulting specification ISO14543-3-11 : 2016 can be found here.
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