What is Zigbee suitable for smart home devices?

What is Zigbee? Why is Zigbee so important to smart home devices? Why is it suitable for smart home? Take these questions to find out about Zigbee.
 

What is Zigbee?

If you are using any kind of smart home technology, then this technology is likely to run on Zigbee. Zigbee is a wireless communication protocol and is a low-power LAN protocol based on the IEEE802.15.4 standard. According to international standards, ZigBee technology is a short-range, low-power wireless communication technology that supports a variety of smart home devices, from thermostats to light bulbs.

Zigbee is designed by the Zigbee Alliance, which includes Amazon, Samsung, Huawei, Qualcomm and Toshiba. More importantly, it is rapidly becoming the wireless protocol standard for smart home devices used for communications.

How does Zigbee work?

Smart devices require wireless communication to receive commands from smart home hubs and related applications and pass information back to these hubs and applications. These devices may be able to use Wi-Fi, and some do, but this is far from ideal.

The reasons are as follows: First, Wi-Fi consumes a lot of power, which is not conducive to low-power devices such as battery power or light bulbs; secondly, there are too many devices on a home network, performance Not stable enough; again, in larger families, scope can be a problem.

Zigbee has several advantages in this regard: first, it consumes less power than Wi-Fi; second, it is designed to support hundreds of devices on the network, although a single center may support far fewer devices. Importantly, Zigbee uses a different network called a mesh network. Each Zigbee device can connect through another Zigbee device instead of directly connecting to a hub like Wi-Fi, which transfers data packets back and forth between the two. With Zigbee, these packets can be relayed through multiple devices during transmission.

This mesh structure means that as long as different devices remain within a certain range and connected to each other, they can communicate with the hub even if they are placed far away from the hub. If the grid is in the middle, you can spread the Zigbee device throughout the house, even in the garden. If a device fails or loses power, it doesn't matter, because other Zigbee devices nearby can fill in the missing links.

Why is Zigbee important?

Zigbee is useful because it is designed for interoperability, so a manufacturer's light bulb or thermostat can still communicate and operate with other manufacturers' equipment. This also means that a manufacturer's switch or motion sensor should work with another manufacturer's light bulb or security camera. Why do you say "should"? This is because some Zigbee devices still don't work well with other Zigbee devices, which is a point that needs improvement.

Another interesting thing about Zigbee is that you can use a variety of devices from different manufacturers without having to have a specific hub for each device. If they all run on the same 2.4GHz wireless band, problems will occur. .

For example, some Zigbee bulbs and thermostats will connect directly to Samsung's SmartThings hub, and many bulbs and hubs built into Amazon Echo Plus or the second-generation Echo Show will also connect directly to Samsung's SmartThings hub. This makes Echo Plus or SmartThings a good and affordable way to get smart home technology compared to a separate hub.
 

Is Zigbee the only choice?

The answer is no, some manufacturers use Wi-Fi because it works directly with the router and does not require a special center. There is also a competitor wireless protocol - z-wave does the same thing, but acts on different frequency bands, it can't interfere with wi-fi (although in practice, this is not a problem for wireless personal area networks). Samsung's SmartThings hub will support both protocols, and some hope that low-power Bluetooth will take over in the future because the grid network is part of its specification, but now its power is "Zigbee." )