Smart Living is also an advancement that gives people the opportunity to benefit from new ways of living. It involves original and innovative solutions aimed at making life more efficient, more controllable, economical, productive, integrated and sustainable.

Smart Living can also allow us to increase our understanding of how people and technology interact by combining sensing with physical action, social behaviour analysis, data analytics, engineering, technology, communication and decision-making into a single, integrated concept. 

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For most of the modern smart home era, ZigBee and WiFi have been the dominant communication protocols. Both are strong contenders, and there are more smart home products arriving every day.

Below we will do a comparison between the two, and you will find out which type of smart home system fits you most!

WiFi is a local area network (LAN) that provides internet access within a limited range. It’s what you use as your home network, and what most public places offer (like coffee shops and airports). WiFi is a star network where there are one central hub and all devices connect to it. This star topology makes it easy to add or remove devices without affecting the rest of the network.

Bandwidth is high—up to 2MHz—which is why it’s perfect for streaming music and checking email on your phone or tablet. But the downfall is that it only works if the signal is strong and if you’re close to the access point. Its average range is between 30 to 100 meters.

Another problem is that it’s not a power-efficient network. WiFi-based devices/products will usually only last about 10 hours, which is why you have to charge your smartphone every day.

Although faster than ZigBee, WiFi shows a variation in speed when it comes to data transfer. Networks defined under 802.11b standard have a maximum transfer speed of 11mbps, while other versions have a max speed of 54mbps. This explains why some people have faster WiFi than others. 

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ZigBee technology is designed to carry small amounts of data over a short distance while consuming very little power. As opposed to WiFi, it’s a mesh networking standard, meaning each device in the network is connected to each other. This means you don’t have to rely solely on the router and the endpoint.

The ZigBee mesh network has slight problems working between eachother, though. What that means is that ZigBee profiles can interfere with one another. So unlike WiFi, if you have two devices with ZigBee chips, it’s possible that they won’t be able to operate with each other.

This technology also has a low-channel bandwidth of 1MHz. It’s restricted to wireless personal area networks (WPAN) and reaches an average of 10 to 30 meters for usual applications. ZigBee’s data transfer speed is lower than WiFi’s, too. Its maximum speed is just 250kbps, much lower than the lowest speed WiFi offers.

ZigBee’s best quality is its low power-consumption rate and battery life. Its protocol was designed as “assemble and forget”, meaning once you set it up, it can last for months.