  The smart home is a major Internet of Things (IoT) application domain with
tremendous market expectations. However, communication solutions for smart home
devices have exhibited a lack of interoperability, especially, but not only, at
the highest layers of the protocol stack. This issue challenges the success of
the smart home concept. In order to overcome this problem, crucial industry
organizations, including Google, Apple, Amazon and the Connectivity Standards
Alliance (formerly, the ZigBee Alliance) have collaborated to produce Matter, a
connectivity solution intended to become a universal standard for the smart
home. This paper overviews, evaluates and discusses Matter, focusing on its
design, features, performance, and potential future directions.
