The environmental censoring is deeply relaying on the wireless data transmission, there came out many a widely used wireless protocols. And with the increasingly requirement of securely and reliably using low data rates on a low power-consumption network, the Zigbee and Z-Wave become popular in recent environmental censoring solutions.

Since it covers many of current widely spread concepts, such as security, reliability, greenness, etc. Here let’s make simple investigation into those two popular mesh network protocols.

Properties

Both Zigbee (2.4GHz) and Z-Wave(900 MHz) operate through a mesh network, in which modules/nodes relay signals, as well as receiving and responding.

Z-Wave_v.s._Zigbee

Competitions

Both Zigbee and Z-Wave are backed up by alliances of a great number of independent manufactures: Zigbee is endorsed by Zigbee Alliance (http://www.zigbee.org/) and Z-Wave is backed by Z-Wave Alliance (http://www.z-wavealliance.org). Since there are similar standards, the battles between them continues.

Nevertheless fierce competition there was, Z-Wave has gradually found its place in the home with a respectable array of home appliance applications while Zigbee has gone more industrial and commercial with their new feature set and capabilities.