The present day houses are all equipped with wireless home automation systems. There are plenty of systems available to us. Following are some.

Wi-Fi: Used for both residential and commercial purposes, Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have been playing an important role in our lives. These may be of two types, open or closed and support various bandwidths with the standard 802.11 being used. This uses the same networking protocols as that of an IP based networks that are used in wired computers.

Bluetooth: Technically known as IEEE 802.15.1, this a short range networking standard created in the early 90’s. Using frequency-hopping spreads spectrum radio technology and Bluetooth transmits data in packets across 79 one-MHz channels. This is often used to connect to speakers when in close proximity to the master device and in the recent times, Bluetooth is used to pair up two mobile devices. The con though is that this trick can only be used when the devices within the range which is usually less than 30 feet.

Z-Wave: This is one of the few home automation systems designed to facilitate low bandwidth data transmissions and can be used to control commercial setting devices. Avoiding interference from devices on the 2.4GHz band, these wireless transmitters operate around at 900 MHz frequency. Originally designed by Sigma Designs and now owned by Zensys, it uses mesh network to send out messages.

ZigBee: Technically known as 802.15.4, this wireless lighting Brisbane standard is an open wireless protocol for personal-area networking (PAN) developed in the early 21st century. It operates on mesh networking principle, which is of low cost and low power standard that can be used as an alternate to the present used standards. Designed with as a very tolerant standard to radio frequency, it is the best system till date for the smart homes. The signals emitted are relayed until it reaches the intended device within the system.

As one can see, ZigBee is the obvious choice above the other standards.

When most people hear of ZigBee, they think that this might be like the Wi-Fi that uses star topology. But, mesh networking used in both Z-wave and ZigBee is different. The device need not necessarily connect to the home device. Unlike the star topology, the message when received by the unintended device is echoed until it gets to the intended device and hence covering much lower powered devices and yet large spaces.

Unlike Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, ZigBee and Z-wave take advantage in low bandwidth and low power devices where they can be used for simple on/off signals. This makes up for an efficient network as most of the residential and commercial areas are already filled with signals on every part of the radio spectrum.

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