zigbee vs. Bluetooth, the wireless question

LAS VEGAS - Jan. 29, 2018 - PRLog -- The question between Zigbee vs. Bluetooth can be confusing as they both are wireless and short distance radios. However, from a commercial, industrial or enterprise oriented control perspective, zigbee is the only option for users in those fields. Here are the following reasons:

1.      Zigbee is the only wireless technology that provides complete protocol families for various applications, including lighting, occupancy sensor, illuminance sensor, lighting switch, power metering, … etc., and Zigbee Alliance has wrapped these protocols into a "Dot Dot" package as an IoT language among "things", which has been adopted by Thread Alliance. The advantage, guaranteeing zigbee devices certified by Zigbee Alliance interoperate with each other, even though they come from different manufactures. In contrast Bluetooth only provides a networking layer protocol and some HID and audio application profiles. These are great for wearables but not for lighting control.

2.      Zigbee is a native mesh network while Bluetooth 5 has a mesh network added-on through "flooding messages." The result is a bandwidth efficiency well below zigbee for network routing capability.

3.      Zigbee can form a larger scale network than Bluetooth. This is simple math as zigbee can support thousands of end points or router devices compared to Bluetooth's limited structure.

4.      Zigbee's radio can reach a further distance than Bluetooth 5 (which has doubled its previous standards) but is still lagging far behind.

5.      At MAC layer, Zigbee is using a better error tolerant coding algorithm to bring a more reliable connection than Bluetooth.

6.      Last but far from least, zigbee has a 15 year head start in programming, manufacturing and deployment.

We know that Bluetooth is much easier for pairing, and has a higher bandwidth than Zigbee which makes it an excellent use for wearables … etc. In the commercial environment you won't be pairing speakers, you'll be pairing hundreds if not thousands of devices.

In the end, these 2 protocols are designed for different applications, and they both have their Pros & Cons for a specific application. It just so happen that in lighting application, Zigbee is a better choice. Bluetooth can be used for home DIY type of lighting control, but not our target market.

Gerald Culbert
Lynxus Technologies
gculbert@magtechind.com
http://lynxus.com