Slashdot Mirror
Is Zigbee the Next Bluetooth?
bz asks: "I work for a small product development company that is considering the use of RF. Naturally, it seems that it would be easier to use a proprietary protocol rather than some of the standards on the market. We are restricted by small code space and low power. The Zigbee protocol needs more memory than we would like to give up. Naturally, if Zigbee is going to become ubiquitous, we would like to sacrifice the extra memory and jump on the bandwagon. However, if it is only going to be as popular as Bluetooth, we would prefer to pass. Is Zigbee going to succeed, or is it likely to follow along the low road that Bluetooth has already paved?"
And you speak as if Bluetooth didn't succeed at all.
Is this a joke article?
Best regards, A.C.
Maybe I just don't undertand the electronics market, but why is it " ...easier to use a proprietary protocol rather than some of the standards on the market"?
Wouldn't it be easier to use a field-tested protocol, like Bluetooth, which already has oodles of cell phones and gadgets to attach to my PC?
10b||~10b -- aah, what a question!
Bluetooth seems to be really catching on in cell phones, laptops, and PDAs. It is actually pretty unlikely that Zigbee will be as popular as Bluetooth. It is too slow for data transfer. Zigbee will mainly be seen in the embedded space. Frankly you better hope that Zigbee is the next Bluetooth. Cheap and available.
Zigbee does look like it will be easier to interface than Bluetooth though.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It is unlikely that zigbee is going to make inroads into the consumer market at all, nevermind as much as bluetooth has done.
Zigbee will be good for connected sensor networks. I suppose eventually someone will start selling personal area networks using zigbee, but those haven't caught on yet, and I doubt zigbee is going to make any significant inroads.
The only advantage to using a standard is interoperability and cheap existing hardware/software. Since zigbee has few standards about what the devices can do and how they are to interact with each other on the application layer, then there is little or no interoperability. Sure, the lightswitch and thermostat have zigbee, but the thermostat has to understand what a lightswitch is and what it does before it can intelligently set the temperature based on the occupancy of the room (presumably based on whether the lights were just turned on).
Since there are no standards for anything but the lowest layers in zigbee, then it is only marginally better than using a proprietary standard. At best when other products come out you can flash yours to understand how to interact, but that's another step down a path that is likely to lead nowhere.
The only advantage to Zigbee is that it can be cheaper in some cases to implement - where you need a rather significant and robust network, but don't want to spend the time and money developing all the prototcols to manage such a beast. If you're doing very simple point to point communications, then zigbee isn't going to save you anything. Or, in other words, if zigbee is more expensive (chipset, code, memory, etc) to implement than another solution, pick the other solution. In some cases it'll be cheaper - when the other solution will take a year to develop and test, and you have more expensive radio components than the zigbee chipsets due to complexity.
-Adam
ZigBee is designed towards the home automation market, *not* wireless sensors. I could name half a dozen more stable and power efficient routing algorithms for WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks) than this beacon crap they came up with. 802.15.4 on the other hand, is being grabbed onto thoroughly, and that's because the advantages of having a stable PHY and Packet layer for WSNs (as opposed to the current situation where various nodes even from the same people can't communicate) is enormous. The combination of a general purpose computing node + 802.15.4 hardware is a damn good idea, and one that's liable to survive for at least a while. I've spent the last few weeks messing around with a TinyOS node with 802.15.4 and porting our MAC layer onto it, and it's been a lot easier than most platforms.
(On this note, don't buy the MaxStream 802.15.4 chips, because they're non-conformant - got an official line on that from one of their engineers. They're building a 802.15.4-like proprietary protocol.)
Beware the psychokinetic mimes!