ZigBee vs. IPv6?
Something is bothering me. I keep hearing that ZigBee and 6LoWPAN are competing technologies. The ZigBee Alliance has taken a stand to force such a confrontation. Its like comparing apples and, well, New York 
6LoWPAN = IPv6 = The Internet
Think about it. The Internet… the most successfull, innovative, massive network ever created. Now what was that Zig thing called again? Does anyone even remember the proprietary, link-specific networking protocols from the 90s?
Here is why ZigBee is not competetive, and shouldn’t be compared to 6LoWPAN and IPv6:
- ZigBee = small-scale isolated ad-hoc networking. 6LoWPAN = massively scalable networking as an end-to-end part of the Internet, it is IPv6!
- ZigBee = limited to a single radio standard. 6LoWPAN = applicable to any low-power, low-rate wireless radio (or even wired! See Watteco). IP protocols tie together heterogeneous networks.
- The only good part of ZigBee is application protocol profiles. And guess what, there is an IETF specification for using ZigBee profiles over UDP/IP. http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-tolle-cap-00.txt
- ZigBee is not a standard, it is a special interest group. Will it be around in a few years? The IETF produces open, long-lived, standards. IPv6 will be around for 20+ years.
- Large-scale enterprise automation, M2M, metering systems etc. require end-to-end addressing, security, mobility, traffic multiplexing, reusability, maintainability, and web-services which are globally scalable… this is the kind of thing IPv6 was designed for.
I only see one option for ZigBee, and that is to get properly networked. I bet soon we’ll be seeing something called ZigBee/IP 2010.
ZigBee over UDP/IPv6
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A great post, as nothing else was to be expected from Zach and Sensinode.
I have to fully agree that IPv6 is the best technological alternative by a very long shot, and that 6LoWPAN is the best implementation of IPv6 on low-power networks.
However, technological graveyards are full with better technologies that succumbed to higher political and economical reasons.
Technology usually follows the mathematics of spontaneous symmetry breaking, where any effect that is only slightly bigger than the rest grows exponentially to gobble the rest of the system, simply because everyone aligns with what they perceive to have a slightly larger piece of the adoption share.
I do hope that IPv6 prevails in the end. It is the best technology available today.
Good,
Best of luck for your initiative.
Apart from poking some fun at ZigBee… comparing it to IPv6 is useless really. They have different roles to play.
What I would like to see is a covergence of technologies in the low-power networking domain. This is what will power the Internet of Things.
Bluetooth – Already IP!
ISA100 – Already IP!
ZigBee/IP – Coming soon?
IP/Z-Wave – Coming soon?
Any others?
could you add a subscription option?
OK, Done. Now there are RSS feeds under Meta on the lower right.
There is no doubt that zigbee is not compareable to 6lowpan. Agreed with shelby that proprietary zigbee can get a place at highest layer.
Glad to have found your post, Zach. Don’t you think that when ZigBee redesigns their network architecture to incoroporate HomePlug that they will bind to IPv6?
This is what I expect, and hope, will happen! When ZigBee goes through network architecture and specification revisions as it has done many times in the past, there would be an excellent chance for it to be bound to 6LoWPAN instead of the network layer used there today. It could even be done as an option allowing for backward compatibility. Do you know of the exact time schedule of the HomePlug integration?
Anyone else have ideas of how and when ZigBee could integrate IPv6 support?
Why not compare zigbee with 6lowpan? ZigBee does have a network layer and supports 3 routing methods. After knowing about 6lowpan and reading David Culler presentation http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~culler/WEI/lectures/L6-6LoWPAN.ppt, I think 6lowpan as network protocol has a lot more merits.
Here’s an opinion from someone very new to the world of low power networks.
I am working on a project to produce a remote machine monitoring system. Obviously the internet is the main transit system but instead of hardwiring the machines to the network I reckoned that because I had heard so much about zigbee i shoudl give it a try. I have had to send beck two zigbee development kits to different vendors for technical issues (product not meeting specification), one of which was a kit which claimed to support Zigbee, but inside had another manufacturer’s 802.15.4 modules which their website said were no longer zigbee compatible. Ouch.
I could see from my initial investigations that the way to go would be an IP based system because it removes the translation step. I applied for a grant to buy Sensinode devices , but was also unsure about their availability, and had to play it safe and buy some zigbee modules and build my own ethernet/zigbee gateway from proprietory products
I can see that Zigbee and 6lowPAN do not perform identical tasks, but that comparison really only seems valid to me when you consider the radio link in isolation. Once you start to view a broader system where you use the radio link as a carrier of raw data then zigbee+gateway type solutions seem unecessary when there is a direct IPV6 route you could take. Of course there is processing overhead to deal with the IPV6 and whatever protocol the messages are coming through in , but I still think that in the long run 6lowPAN will succeed in making links which are cheaper and easier to manage than zigbee based systems.
could you add a subscription option?
Hi,
Good idea, finally figured out how to do it with Feedburner. Go ahead and subscribe with a feed or by e-mail. Thanks for the tip!
Zach