ZigBee has recently been somewhat sidelined in the hot debate over which short range wireless standards will dominate the ‘internet of things’ (IoT). The speed and ubiquity of low power Wi-Fi, and the rapid advance of Bluetooth Low Energy, have stolen the limelight from ZigBee, Z-Wave and others when it comes to connecting up every device on the planet. But the standard, mainly used in the industrial M2M market, has gained a significant boost from Samsung, which plans to support it in some smartphones.
Although the standards battle is focused heavily on new connections ‘ devices and appliances which do not currently link to the internet, or M2M products upgrading from low speed connections ‘ incorporation in smartphones will b e a vital step to mass adoption. The handset is poised to play a key role in managing and monitoring the connected home, in the same way it is increasingly used as a remote control for home media and TV systems.
So the ZigBee Alliance will be cheered at reports that Samsung and HTC are to support the standard in some handsets, enabling users to control existing and future home appliances which run ZigBee. Items such as light switches and window blinds sometimes incorporate ZigBee, though Z-Wave is more common in the home automation field (by a factor of 10:1, according to some estimates). And now Bluetooth LE and even low power Wi-Fi are gaining ground as companies evaluate the benefits of a single protocol spanning low speed, low energy home networks, such as security monitoring, and high speed home media and mobile connections.
Most players in this field agree that ZigBee needs to up the ante to get a significant role in the home ‘ and therefore, in some other emerging IoT areas, since home automation is widely seen as the springboard to the ‘everything connected’ world, to a greater extent than ZigBee’s industrial stronghold. Qualcomm and Broadcom are betting heavily on Bluetooth LE, and against ZigBee ‘ but of course, demand from Samsung for a smartphone platform with integrated ZigBee could change their minds.
However, the handset giant will need other things to fall into place before it will see its gamble on ZigBee translate into a major differentiator for its devices. The ZigBee Alliance needs to learn lessons from the Bluetooth SIG and strengthen its profiles in areas like easy discoverability and security, while ZigBee will also need native support in Android and iOS (Bluetooth LE recently achieved that in Android).
In May, Broadcom said it would major on Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (including Low Energy), because other options have less scale, and therefore higher costs. It also said that, though ZigBee is a standard, it is very open to interpretation, so devices do not necessarily interoperate well, whereas Wi-Fi and Bluetooth offer strong interworking and certification, as well as a common platform from high end devices to M2M.
These are all serious points, but ZigBee has advantages too, including extremely low power and a mesh approach. In May, it completed its Smart Energy Profile 2, aware that this is the most immediate route into the broader connected home sector. The Alliance says SEP 2 will take ZigBee beyond its traditional markets in industrial controls and, though targeted at smart grid applications, it is likely to be the basis for broader use cases in future.
ZigBee SEP 2 provides IP-based information and control for energy management in so-called HANs (home area networks), for both wired and wireless networks. It supports new capabilities such as control of plug-in and hybrid electric vehicle chargers; and deployments in multi-dwelling buildings. It is designed to be flexible, for instance by supporting interfaces to allow multiple energy services in one premises. And it supports any IETF IP-compliant transport protocol, with the new ZigBee IP only one option.