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DA4. Bluetooth vs Zigbee

Statement

Discuss the differences between Bluetooth and Zigbee technologies. Share your thoughts on which technology you believe is better suited for Internet of Things (IoT) applications and explain your reasoning.

Answer

IoT applications are of increasing popularity, they are used in automating homes, industries, and even in healthcare; the idea of an IoT is to put a device somewhere and have it operate independently with minimal controlling cost; this puts some requirements on the device such as low power consumption, low cost, ability to communicate with other devices or its controller, and to be secure.

Mesh networking is popular when building IoT applications; it allows for extending communications capabilities beyond the range of an individual device by transmitting data through to its next connected devices (hops) and so on; this has led to the development of self-healing and dynamic networks, where one or a few devices can go offline, but the network will still be operational.

Both Bluetooth and Zigbee are wireless technologies that are used in IoT applications, and their support of mesh networking makes them of special interest. Bluetooth is an older technology that dates back to 1994; it was originally designed for Personal Area Networks (PAN) and connecting peripherals to a main device such as a computer or a phone; later, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) was introduced to reduce power consumption and to allow for longer battery life, and then BLEs where connected to create Bluetooth Mesh which is the Bluetooth technology that can be compared with Zigbee(Bhatt, 2019).

Zigbee is a relatively newer technology that was designed specifically to support Mesh networking; it was designed to match the requirements of IoT applications, thus, it is designed to be low power, low cost, and to support a large number of devices in a single network (up to 65,000 devices) (Farnell, 2019).

The table below summarizes the differences between Bluetooth and Zigbee technologies (Digi International, 2021), (Farnell, 2019), (Bhatt, 2019):

Aspect Bluetooth Mesh Zigbee
Frequency 2.4 GHz 2.4 GHz
Range 100 m 100 m
Devices up to 32,000 (in a Mesh) up to 65,000
Power Consumption Low Low
Transfer Speed up to 2 Mbps 250 kbps
Security AES-128 encryption AES-128 encryption
Support Android, iOS, Windows Not widely supported
Range 100 m up to 291 m
Support IP Routing No No
Scaling Less scalable More scalable

As the table shows, both technologies have a lot in common; the lack of support for IP routing is a disadvantage for both technologies, as it adds complexity to the implementation of both protocols as they require a gateway to connect to the internet; and these aspects are mostly theoretical, which means that practical implementations might have different results.

To conclude, I think that Bluetooth Mesh is better suited for IoT applications; it has a higher transfer speed and more support, but it is less scalable; which brings us to the point that no one technology is better, but the decision should be based on the purpose of the application; If you are automating the lighting of a small building or making a smart home, then Bluetooth Mesh is the better choice; but if you are building a large industrial IoT application, or lighting an entire city, then Zigbee is the better choice.

References

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