As an interoperable standard, devices from many different manufacturers can communicate seamlessly, helping to create Zigbee's broad acceptance in both home automation and industrial IoT.
The Zigbee mesh configures itself automatically (self-forming) and will reconfigure dynamically to repair itself if nodes are disabled or removed (self-healing). Substantial mesh networks can be created with Zigbee that are much larger than the reach of any one radio. There are approximately 300 million Zigbee nodes currently deployed. Zigbee's 2.4 GHz frequency range can be implemented globally, license-free. Messages "hop" through intermediary radio nodes on the way to their destination. The Zigbee protocol allows the transmission of data over long distances by passing information through a mesh network of intermediate nodes to reach distant ones. Zigbee is an open global standard for cost-effective low-power, low-bandwith wireless mesh networking, developed by a consortium of companies in the Zigbee Alliance. This will help explain the trade-offs and show some use cases for each, so that you can choose the optimal protocol for your IoT application - be it a smart city, industrial IoT, digital signage or other connected technology use case. To better understand these IoT protocol options, let's take a look at the advantages and limitations of Zigbee, followed by the same for three different "flavors" of Bluetooth: Classic, BLE, and BT Mesh. In certain situations, one protocol will be a better fit than the other, though sometimes the right solution is to implement both together to take advantage of their combined strengths, as we will discuss in this article.
Each protocol has unique strengths that guide which solution to implement when designing a new network.
DigiMesh White Paper Compare the capabilities of Zigbee and DigiMesh to find the right protocol for your application DOWNLOAD PDFBoth Zigbee® and Bluetooth® wireless protocols are widely used for local communications in Internet of Things (IoT) applications, and there are some trade-offs to review in choosing the right one for your application.