When I first started automating my home in the 1980s, X10 was the only protocol that enabled information to be communicated between smart home devices. Thankfully, there is now a wide range of modern smart home protocols and devices that incorporate them. Protocols used by today’s smart home devices include:
Zigbee, Z-Wave, Z-Wave Long Range, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Wi-Fi, Thread, HomeKit, DotDot, and Sidewalk.
With much thanks to Johan Pederson, manager, product marketing – smart home & consumer IoT at Silicon Labs, this article will try to make sense of today’s smart home protocols and talk about the changes coming in the near future.
The Zigbee standard was developed by the Zigbee Alliance, which re-branded itself as the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) in 2021. Today, the CSA is a consortium of more than 350 companies in more than 37 countries and is “on a mission to simplify and harmonize the IoT.”
Zigbee is an open standard wireless protocol designed to allow IoT devices to communicate with each other. Its devices primarily operate at 2.4 GHz, which is the same frequency range as Wi-Fi. Similar to Wi-Fi, Zigbee breaks down the 2.4 GHz frequency spectrum into a series of channels, so a channel can be chosen for devices to communicate on to minimize
