(Editor’s Note: This article, excerpts from ZigBee Resource Guide. )
Over the past two years, an interesting trend has become apparent, one that may be critical to the future of ZigBee. The issue of interoperability has moved up to the networking stack. A few years ago, the industry was primarily focused on the networking layer to solve interoperability problems. This thinking was a result of the “one winner” connectivity model. That is, a single protocol could “win” the IoT or the smart home, dominating the market and becoming the obvious choice for all products. Since then, OEMs and tech titans like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Samsung have organized higer-level ecosystems, often compsoedof two or more connectivity protocols, which have moved the concern for interoperability to the application level. Today, it is less relevant that ZigBee and Z-Wave aren’t interoperable at the networking level. With ecosystems such as SmartThings, products using either protocol can coexist within a system with interoperability resolved at the application level.
This model is beneficial for the industry and the consumer. By choosing an ecosystem, the consumer can be assured that certified products will work together despite differences in lower level protocols. Importantly, ecosystems can be made to work together too.
For ZigBee, this phenomenon highlights the need to be included in developing ecosystems. So far, most smart home ecosystems have focused on platform connectivity, often ignoring resource constrained applications. However, as connectivity continues to move into low-value applications, the need to comprehend resource constrained will become more important, pressuring ecosystems to add low-bitrate, low-power protocols. Obviously, ZigBee is a good chioce for this application. ZigBee’s greatest asset, its broad and robust application profile library, will play an important role as ecosystems realize the need to control dozens of disparate device types. We’ve already seen the value of the library to Thread, allowing it to bridge the gap to the application level.
ZigBee is entering an era of intense competition, but the reward is immense. Luckily, we know the IoT is not a “winner take all” battleground. Multiple protocols and ecosystems will thrive, finding defensible positions in applications and markets which is not the solution to every connectivity problem, nor is ZigBee. There is plenty of room for success in the IoT, but there is no guarantee of it either.
Post time: Sep-24-2021