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Communications

Is Zigbee the Next Bluetooth? 66

Posted by Cliff from the rise-or-fall-of-another-wireless-technology dept.
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?"
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Is Zigbee the Next Bluetooth? More

Is Zigbee the Next Bluetooth?

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  • Why does it matter? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Cumshot ( 859434 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @06:08PM (#14161390)
    Why does it matter whether or not Zigbee "becomes" popular? If it works for you, use it.

    And you speak as if Bluetooth didn't succeed at all.

    Is this a joke article?

    • Bluetooth succeeded? I don't own a single BT device. I don't really know anyone who does. I know it is still used in some situations, but it never became really widespread. Perhaps not a horrible failure, since some devices use it, but not a roaring success and definitely not up to the hype.
      • A lot of Mac systems come with built-in bluetooth standard or optional, and Apple's own wireless mice and keyboards use it. When I visit home, my sister bugs me to download her cellphone pictures using my Powerbook's bluetooth because she doesn't have a bluetooth card herself and (reasonably) doesn't want to pay for the transfer service. She asked for a bluetooth adapter for Christmas.
        That's my experience, anyway.
      • I think you are underestimating Bluetooth because you don't have any experience with it. Perhaps if you did actually own a device you could pull it out when you are out somewhere in public, do a device discovery, and see that Bluetooth is not so uncommon as you might think. Tens of millions of cell phones have bluetooth radios, as does almost every modern PDA. Almost all laptops at least offer it as an option if it doesn't come standard. Heck, most automakers offer bluetooth options in their cars. Many inve
        • I Concur. Bluetooth 2.0 specification has been out since 2004 and you will see more and more devices using it, the new PowerBooks already have it in them. I personally think it is great. What most people don't understand is that it is a different type of wireless (a P2P type protocol) and with all the WiFi hoopla many people overlook it usefulness. Zigbee may be a good alternative, but I haven't seen much consumer usage and it seems to be more of an industrial and hobbyist tool.
        • perhaps if you did actually own a device you could pull it out when you are out somewhere in public, do a device discovery, and see that Bluetooth is not so uncommon as you might think.

          I own at least 10 bluetooth devices, from mice and keyboards to phones and printers and so on. I also occasionally on the train trip home do exactly as you say, and regularly find a dozen devices within the 10m range.

        • I use this [gatefold.co.uk] on my Smartphone all the time at school to send people unsolicited "You have just been BlueJacked!" messages every time I walk past their Palm/Powerbook/Nokia phone.

          The "lean-in and look around" reactions I get are SO worth it.
      • Hmm, I don't own a Corvette, and I don't really know anyone who does. I know they're driven in some situations, but they definately weren't a roaring success... That sort of "I don't use it therefore it's not "there"" logic is asinine at best. I work at a cell phone shop in Central New Jersey as my secondary job. We sell T-Mobile and we also import phones from overseas to see unlocked. I'd have to say "Camera" is the most often asked for feature, with Bluetooth pulling in second place by a hair. In a norm
      • Almost everybody I know has a phone with bluetooth in it. I see people with bluetooth handsfree headsets on all the time, especially tradespeople who do a lot of driving. Of course, the popularity of it here in the UK may be something to do with the fact that it recently became illegal to use your mobile phone whilst driving without using a hands-free headset. But even for those who don't drive, it's quite nice to easily be able to exchange pictures and videos between phones without having to use IR. I als
      • Well, I have three BT devices and to my surprise I use all three of them. The key is my P910 Bluetooth Phone/PDA. I connect to it with my laptop (for file transfer when I am without cables) and ot a BT earpiece (for driving).

        I'm also planning to see if I can connect earpiece to laptop for skype calling while wandering about.
        • The BT-Skype thing works very well on my Mac at least. I use it every day and I am beginning to despise a stupid handset.

          The only problem with BT is the range, when I walk out of the room the connection breaks.
      • Bluetooth succeeded? I don't own a single BT device. I don't really know anyone who does.

        Let me see...
        Bluetooth Smartphone, Bluetooth Headset, Bluetooth Palm T5, Bluetooth in my Mac, Bluetooth in my laptop. All used every day for phone calls, synchronisation and internet access on the move.

        I think bluetooth has definately succeeded here.

      • I don't own a single BT device. I don't really know anyone who does.

        And I can't think of many people I know that don't own a bluetooth device. I have a laptop, a mobile phone, a PDA, and a hands free headset, all with bluetooth. In particular, it's virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone without bluetooth these days. Yeah, I'd say bluetooth is definitely a success.

        • Maybe its doing a lot bigger in the EU (I see a lot fo UK people posting about cell phones). Here in the US, only the very high end very expensive models have it. And most people (including myself) buy the cheapest version. Usually the one that comes free with the plan.
          • Anyway, doesn't make the claim that Bluetooth haven't suceed true.
          • That's because, with some notable exceptions, most high end cell phones in the US are models which are obsolete in the rest of the world. You do realise that for many places, two way cellular video calling has been available as a commodity for /3 years/? That for 2+ years, you can get phones that can burst data to 2mbps, sustain 384kbps+? I regularly have friends from the US mention their new Nokia - usually a different model number because of the different networking standards, so I look at the phone on No
          • On Cingular, the USA's largest carrier, 8 (out of 16) of their currently available online non-PDA, non-Blackberry devices are Bluetooth capable.
            All of their PDA and Blackberry devices are Bluetooth capable. You can get a Bluetooth capable device (either the Sony Ericsson Z520a, or a refurbished Blackberry), for only $70 online. The Z520a is definitely not a very high end expensive model; it's considered by some as low-end. Retail resellers often offer Bluetooth-capable phones for less, or even free; I thin

  • Naturally? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by forsetti ( 158019 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @06:14PM (#14161443)
    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?
    • Often when using published protocols there is a high learning curve and there is extra configuration required to allow for all the features of the protocol. If you are doing something simple it's often easier to just do it youself (although you may have more bugs).
      • then again, existing protocols have things like existing code, libraries, api's, references, and oh yes, people that already know them.

        and not all zigbee stacks are monolithic. it is possible to use just what you need. if your vendor says it can't be done, look for another.
    • Standards produced by commitees of corporate representatives tend not to be well-factored, but rather tend to support a mish-mash of features twisted into a tangle, so that everyone can get their pet feature, and hold it up like a gold star on their report card when they get home to the corporate offices. The resulting complexity also helps to keep out small players, and slows down the inevitable competition from open sources.

  • Only as sucessful as Bluetooth??? (Score:5, Informative)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @06:20PM (#14161502) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • Zigbee is as much not bluetooth as bluetooth is not WLAN.

      If you see bluetooth as an alternative to WLAN then bluetooth has utterly failed because it is just a wholly different thing, with completely different application areas. Zigbee is for a third, completely separate application area.

      The only thing those 3 technologies overlap in are the frequencies used.

    • Re:Only as sucessful as Bluetooth??? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      With over 9.5 million Bluetooth devices [silicon.com] shipping per week, Zigbee can only wish that it would be so sucessful.
      • I know about three dozen people that have at least one device with Bluetooth. I only know one peerson using it - to replace a $1 wired cellphone earphone with a $120 wireless headset.

        While manufacturers are shipping many BT devices, how many people are actually using the functionality?

  • Followup question... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bscott ( 460706 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @06:27PM (#14161562)
    > Is ZigBee going to succeed ...and while you're at it, what are the winning numbers for this weekend's Powerball?
  • Bluetooth has a class 3 that is specified at 1mW for upto a meter. I havent seen anything like that in zigbee, the atmel chip has 12mW receiving power, although I'm not sure if the bluetooth spec is while busy or average.

  • Zigbee... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stienman ( 51024 ) <adavis@@@ubasics...com> on Thursday December 01, 2005 @06:40PM (#14161674) Homepage Journal
    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
    • Since you're worried about low power, I'm assuming this is an embedded type product, probably battery powered.

      Embedded memory's just not that expensive anymore... Freescale's 64k flash MCU with built-in Zigbee (MC13213 (there's 13211/2/4 as well) is sampling now and should cost you less than USD5 each. the 32k or 16k versions (with reduced stack functionality) are a little cheaper.

      If you want a robust, highly-capable stack, it's a lot cheaper/quicker than writing your own. If the only reason for selecti

    • Since there are no standards for anything but the lowest layers in zigbee, then it is only marginally better than using a proprietary standard.

      My biggest qualm is that Zigbee itself is a highly proprietary standard. I'm fine with having computers orchestrate all levels of interaction, being middlemen in the sensor networks to get sensors to talk to each other, but as it stands we've got to sit around with our thumbs up our asses while people release readymade Zigbee solutions... because we cant built hte @

  • 802.15.4 good, ZigBee bad (Score:5, Informative)

    by palfrey ( 198640 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @07:00PM (#14161818) Homepage
    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.)
    • Aren't 802.15.4 and ZigBee the same thing? There links seem to indicate that they are either the same, or very closely related:

      http://www.caba.org/standard/zigbee.html [caba.org]

      http://www.networkworld.com/details/6549.html [networkworld.com]

      If a sensor were to run TinyOS and communicate with ZigBee, and also claim to be 802.15.4 compliant, would that allow us to work with only the 802.15.4 layer? The MicaZ series that Crossbow (xbow.com) sells would be one example of something my research group would be looking at.
      • 802.15.4 is the PHY, Packet and a basic MAC layer. ZigBee is a routing layer on top of 802.15.4.

        Right now, TinyOS has limited 802.15.4 support (certainly for the CC2420 radio that the MicaZ uses), but no-one AFAIK has implemented ZigBee support yet. I'm thinking that a more sensible option is to use 802.15.4 to actually do packet level transmission, but then use another routing layer (shameless plug [tevp.net]) to do node-to-node transmission. How to do this is to have 802.15.4 nodes from RandomCompany doing the act

    • But will they use it? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by woolio ( 927141 ) *
      Home automation is really cool, but how many people are going to use it?

      Radio Shack has (used to?) sold the "X11" modules since the early/mid 80s... They could control lights, fans, thermostat, etc... I think they even had them intergrated into light switches, etc... And they had a module that could be programmed with a computer to automate everything... Even had something so that you could control the house from a telephone...

      Sadly, this seems to have gone the way of the Dodo bird and the Clapper...

      Eve
  • I did a little research when trying to find a wireless network for my project. Zigbee is such low bandwidth, that unless they adapt the standards, it won't be very useful for much past sensor networks. Plus, you have to recalibrate the routing nodes if they move, which means it's really not adaptable for a moving environment (hence the reason we discounted it) because the bandwidth is ~32k/s and recalibration often enough to make it useful for networking drops this well below anything practical for much p

    • Re:No way (Score:3, Informative)

      by rastachops ( 543268 )
      No-one seems to understand the purpose of Bluetooth or Zigbee. Zigbee is designed to be low power, make once, then use until it's battery dies and for sensors. Adhoc networks for routing and low response times( I think its about 40ms instead of Bluetooth's 3seconds ish) but also low bandwidth.
      It's not intended to be a Bluetooth killer. They are both great for their designed purposes. Bluetooth for rechargable peripherals and Zigbee for making a load of probes to scatter around a plant to measure temperatu
      • I never said what you think I said. We had a relatively low bandwidth product that zigbee would have worked for, except that the objects will move, which means recalibration, which means our bandwidth is almost saturated by that. Bluetooth won't work, either, because of the limitation of nodes, sure you can bridge them (or whatever that's called) but that was ineffective as well. So we just settled on 802.11b and a couple extra antenna. Not the ideal solution, but one that works now.

        • Re:No way (Score:2, Interesting)

          by zeenixus ( 571630 )
          interesting. i'm involved with a project right now which is based around moving "tags", if you will. We are fairly sure zigbee (or something quite similar) is the way to go, and have spoken with multiple companies whose engineers think this is doable with a little coding.

          we're not in need of realtime data, a few minutes between samplings will do, but we do have a rather high tag number (thousands) requirement.
  • Not with a name like that.

  • Need more information (Score:3)

    by CMiYC ( 6473 ) on Thursday December 01, 2005 @11:13PM (#14163187) Homepage
    Okay the question is, what do you want to do with them? Are you using them for something sensor based? Then go with Zigbee. Are you interested in two intelligent devices sharing data, go with Bluetooth. Ask yourself what your application is and what technologies works best for it.
    • Exactly. The question should be more about hte specs and the situation, not whether or not it's going to be popular years later.

      One major quesiton that should be considered when figuring this out (along with the parent's questions): are Zigbee's data rates sufficient for your use? Do you need a self-organizing mesh network, or are you just going to have a device talk to a computer?

      This question sounds like its coming from someone from business development, not engineering.

  • Extra Memory for Zigbee? (Score:3, Informative)

    by fwc ( 168330 ) on Friday December 02, 2005 @12:05AM (#14163430)
    Unless you are implementing this in a *really* small processor, Zigbee should fit in about anything. For example, Microchip has an royalty-free implementation of the ZigBee protocol which only needs about 32K for a coordinator and 15K for a RFD (endpoint).

    • 32k! (Score:2)

      by xtal ( 49134 )
      Most of the micros I work with have less than 16k of flash (program) memory, and 1k of SRAM for variables and stack space is a luxury.

      It's bad enough you need to use 512 byte blocks to write to MMC cards.

      Cheap, robust, available wireless would be a real boon.. we have robust and available, but definately not cheap.
  • I seem to remember somewhere that when Zigbee was being announced and talked about and hyped, it was always toted as a "free(r)" standard than bluetooth. Of course, that went out the window and now you need another corporate license to even think about using the technology. At least they released the spec for academic use, but its basically reverted to bluetooth levels of control.

    The stacks are much smaller. 30k v. 200k. If they actually gave a license open source could use though, I'd be willing to be
  • Zigbee is for low data rate- larger range. Bluetooth is high data rate- low range. like comparing Apples and Oranges.
  • There's another protocol out there that's targetting home automation, Z-wave. A friend that develops products in that space complained that Zigbee is somewhat bloated, and he's going the Z-wave route instead. Z-wave is from Zensys [zen-sys.com], and it may be starting out as their protocol, but to last, it will have to be somewhat open, like X10.
  • In my view Zigbee is going to be huge. Just like Bluetooth was widely misunderstood when it made its debut (commonly asked questions were "why would I need Bluetooth when we have IEEE 802.11b?" and "how is this any better than HomeRF?"), I don't think many people "get it". With Zigbee there finally will be a standard for very low cost, low power wireless communications and a simple enough stack to enable a host of uses in home automatiion, etc.
  • Doesn't have the same bandwidth as bluetooth. More of a signalling RF platform. I haven't played with ZigBee yet, but I'm involved with RFID and we're considering it for a few data applications.

    The nice thing about ZigBee is it connects pretty much instataeous, unlike 802.11b and BlueTooth. Basically you 'switch on' your device and it's connected - instantly.

    I have a bluetooth gps reciever. I would love it to have ZigBee, i find the whole waiting for the bluetooth to connect (even if only a few secon

  • Sure its not as wide spread as we all were told it would be, but its *nowhere* near dead.

    Its adoption is making slow progress, which is normally how technologies that are in it for the long haul happen.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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