Which Of The Following Is A Short-range Wireless Technology - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

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If you’ve decided wireless connectivity is the best method to link your product to the world, then you’ve made a good decision. The convenience, mobility, and flexibility this brings will make the product far more compelling to your target market. But after taking a moment to pat yourself on the back, it’s time to get down to the hard graft of design.

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The work begins with deciding what form of wireless connectivity best suits the product. Let’s assume you want to connect your device to another wireless-enabled product and/or to the Internet and make it part of the Internet of Things (IoT). We’ll also assume you’ve decided to choose a standard technology (rather than one of the many short-range proprietary solutions) to take advantage of interoperability with other manufacturers’ products. Finally, let’s assume that you want to connect wirelessly over a range of fewer than 100 meters (m).

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That narrows things down a lot. But even within these constraints, the choice of short-range wireless technology can be bewildering. Finding a solution comes down to methodically defining what uses the wireless link will have.

All short-range wireless technologies trade-off range, throughput, power consumption, and interference immunity. Generally, greater range and/or throughput comes at the cost of increased power consumption. Good interference immunity—an important requirement for radio technologies operating in crowded parts of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum—such as the 2.4 GHz band—can also help save power by eliminating the need to constantly resend radio packets that fail to arrive at the receiver. Other important factors to consider are mesh networking and Internet Protocol (IP) interoperability.

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The key short-range wireless technologies

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, and Thread (which like Zigbee, runs on the IEEE 802.15.4-compliant radio), represent the mainstream short-range wireless technologies. But this is far from a comprehensive list of short-range wireless solutions. Other technologies, such as ultra-wideband (UWB), near field communication (NFC), Wireless M-Bus, Z-Wave, and Wi-SUN, are worthy of consideration for many niche applications. However, for now, let’s look at more mainstream options.

If throughput and IP interoperability are at the top of the spec list, then Wi-Fi is the leading option. The most popular solution right now is Wi-Fi 5 (formerly IEEE 802.11ac), which offers a maximum theoretical throughput of 3.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) and a maximum indoor range of 100 m. The technology is based on multiple channels, which boost throughput and overcome problems with multipath fading (interference due to the receiver seeing several reflections of a single transmitted signal). The Wi-Fi stack also includes baked-in IPv6, so there’s no requirement for an additional router or gateway to send data to the cloud.

Figure 1: Wi-Fi incorporates IPv6 to connect seamlessly with the Internet. (Image source: Netgear)

Wi-Fi’s throughput potential demands access to lots of transceiver power, so this is not the right choice of technology if the energy budget is limited. And Wi-Fi is not optimized to support dozens of networked devices. That said, Wi-Fi 6 (formerly IEEE 802.11ax)—which has recently been adopted with some chips now available—addresses these drawbacks to some extent by improving the technology’s spectral efficiency.

If low power consumption is the most important design parameter, then Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE), Zigbee, and Thread merit closer inspection. There are many similarities between these technologies due to shared DNA from the IEEE 802.15.4 specification mentioned above. IEEE 802.15.4 describes physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers for low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPANs). The technologies generally operate at 2.4 GHz, although there are some sub-GHz variants of Zigbee.

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Bluetooth LE is a low-power version of “classic” Bluetooth, the consumer-oriented wireless tech that first found a niche linking smartphones to wireless headsets. Bluetooth LE became part of the Bluetooth protocol with the release of version 4.0. It draws about one-tenth of the power of Bluetooth while still offering a maximum of 2 Mbits/s of raw data throughput and a range of 50 m.

The technology is suited to IoT applications such as smart home sensors where data transmissions are modest and infrequent. It features 40 channels and a sophisticated Channel Selection Algorithm (CSA) to mitigate interference. Bluetooth LE’s interoperability with the Bluetooth chips hosted by most smartphones is also a big advantage for consumer-oriented applications such as wearables (Figure 2). Key downsides to the technology are the requirement for an expensive and power-hungry gateway to connect to the cloud and clunky mesh networking capabilities resulting in increased latency compared with alternatives.

Figure 2: Bluetooth LE is interoperable with smartphones, making it a key choice for wearables. (Image source: Nordic Semiconductor/DO Technologies)

Zigbee is also a good choice for low-power and low-throughput applications in industrial automation, commercial, and the home. Its throughput is lower than Bluetooth LE, at 250 kilobits per second (Kbits/s), while its range and power consumption is similar. Zigbee is not interoperable with smartphones, nor does it offer native IP capability. It works across 16 channels, and like Bluetooth LE, it employs a channel-hopping algorithm to avoid interference. A key advantage of Zigbee comes from it being designed from the ground up for mesh networking, making it a good choice for applications such as smart lighting and others that demand low latency.

Thread is a relative newcomer to the short-range wireless sector having been first introduced in 2014. Like Zigbee, it operates using the IEEE 802.15.4 PHY and MAC and has been designed to support large mesh networks of up to 250 devices. Throughput is the same as Zigbee at 250 Kbits/s, power consumption is similar, and the maximum range is about 30 m. Where Thread differs from Zigbee is through its use of 6LoWPAN (a combination of IPv6 and low-power WPANs), making connectivity with other devices and the cloud straightforward, albeit via a network edge device called a border router.

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Cooperation rather than competition

There is a realization in the short-range wireless sector that no single technology will dominate because of the inevitable trade-offs each must make to satisfy their target applications. This knowledge has led to an unusually high degree of cooperation between industry groups to guarantee interoperability between many short-range wireless protocol stacks.

One example of this spirit of collaboration is Matter, an initiative driven by the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA – formerly the Zigbee Alliance), which includes Apple, Amazon, and Google among its 180 member companies. Matter emphasizes security and interoperability. It introduces a network layer that knits together Zigbee, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi so that devices can interoperate, regardless of brand or device function. Commercial products with the Matter stamp of approval were due to arrive before the end of 2021. This will be a pivotal moment in short-range wireless.

A further option for the designer wishing to retain maximum flexibility in the choice of protocol while designing a single product variant is to select a multiprotocol, short-range wireless chip. Many silicon vendors offer these single-chip or module solutions that support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, Thread, or some combination thereof. The chips’ embedded microprocessors look after protocol switching as required.

Conclusion

Designing in short-range wireless connectivity makes a product more compelling to the end-user. Since there is a wide range of technologies available to the developer, making the best choice is not easy. All short-range wireless technologies trade-off range, throughput, power consumption, and interference immunity. The key to making the best selection is to carefully consider the uses to which the end-product will be put, the importance of the end-user experience, and then choosing the wireless technology with matching strengths.

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