(Editor’s Note: This article, excerpts from ZigBee Resource Guide. )
Despite daunting competition on the horizon, ZigBee is well positioned for the next phase of low-power IoT connectivity. The preparations of the past year are complete and are critical for the success of the standard.
The ZigBee 3.0 standard promises to make interoperability a natural outcome of designing with ZigBee rather than an intentional afterthought, hopefully eliminating a source of criticism of the past. ZigBee 3.0 is also the culmination of a decade of experience and lessons learned the hard way. The value of this can’t be overstated.. Product designers value robust, time tested, and production proven solutions.
The ZigBee Alliance has also hedged their bets by agreeing to work with Thread to enable ZigBee’s application library to operate on Thread’s IP networking layer. This adds an all-IP network option to the ZigBee ecosystem. This may be critically important. While IP adds significant overhead to resource-constrained applications, many in the industry believe that the advantages of end-to-end IP support in the IoT outweighs the drag of IP overhead. In the past year, this sentiments has only increased, giving end-to-end IP support a sense of inevitability throughout the IoT. This cooperation with Thread is good for both parties. ZigBee and Thread have very complemrntary needs – ZigBee needs lightweight IP support and Thread needs a robust application profile library. This joint effort could lay the founfation for a gradual de facto merger of the standards in years to come if IP support is as critical as many believe, a desirable win-win outcome for the industry and the end user. A ZigBee-Thread alliance may also necessary to achieve the scale needed to fend off threats from Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Post time: Sep-17-2021