What is Zigbee and why is it best for smart home devices?

What is Zigbee?

If you use a smart home technology in your home, it is likely that this technology uses the Zigbee protocol. Zigbee is a wireless communication protocol and a low-power local area network protocol based on the IEEE820.15.4 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 refrigerators and light bulbs.

Zigbee is set by the Zigbee Alliance, whose members include Amazon, Samsung, Huawei, Qualcomm, and Toshiba. More importantly, it is quickly becoming the wireless protocol standard that smart home devices use to communicate.

How does Zigbee work?
Smart devices need wireless communication to receive commands from smart home hubs and related applications, and to 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.

There are several reasons for this. First, Wi-Fi consumes a lot of power, which is not conducive to battery-powered or low-power devices such as light bulbs. Second, there are too many devices on a home network and performance is not stable enough. Third, in larger homes, range can also be an issue.

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 hub may support far fewer devices than that. Most importantly, Zigbee uses a different kind of network, called a mesh network. Each Zigbee device can connect through another Zigbee device, rather than directly connecting to a hub like Wi-Fi, which transmits packets back and forth between the two. With Zigbee, these packets can be relayed through multiple devices during transmission.

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

Why is Zigbee important?
Zigbee is useful because it is designed for interoperability, so one manufacturer's light bulb or thermostat can still communicate and operate with another manufacturer's device. This also means that one manufacturer's switch or motion sensor should work with another manufacturer's light bulb or security camera. But why "should"? This is because some zigbee devices still don't play well with other zigbee devices, which is something that needs to be improved now.

Another interesting thing about Zigbee is that you can use a variety of different devices from different manufacturers without needing a specific hub for each one, but this can be a problem if they all run on the same 2.4GHz band.

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

Is Zigbee the only option?
The answer is no. Some manufacturers use Wi-Fi because it works directly with the router and doesn't require a special hub. There's also a rival wireless protocol - Z-Wave - that does the same thing, but operates on a different frequency band, and it can't interfere with Wi-Fi (although in practice, this isn't a problem for Wi-Fi). Samsung's SmartThings hub will support both protocols, and some are also hoping that Bluetooth Low Energy will take over in the future since mesh networking is part of its specification, but for now, it's all about "Zigbee."