How does ZigBee compare to Bluetooth?
ZigBee was developed to serve very different applications than Bluetooth and leads to tremendous optimizations in power consumption. Some of the key differentiators are: • ZigBee: • Very low duty cycle, very long primary battery life, • Static and dynamic star and mesh networks, >65,000 nodes, with low latency available, • Ability to remain quiescent for long periods without communications, • Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum allows devices to sleep without the requirement for close synchronization. • Bluetooth: • Moderate duty cycle, secondary battery lasts same as master, • Very high QoS and very low, guaranteed latency, • Quasi-static star network up to seven clients with ability to participate in more than one network, • Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum is extremely difficult to create extended networks without large synchronization cost.
