Zigbee and Thread use a radio standard defined in IEEE 802.15.4 that targets low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN). The standard specifies a radio network optimized for low-rate data transmission, low power consumption and meshed networking. With several hundred millions of devices on the market, they are the dominant meshed network technologies for smart homes and buildings, metering, smart cities, industrial automation and safety applications. Zigbee and Thread are expected to see tremendous growth in the smart home and smart building market. However, other protocols applying the same physical layer such as 6LoPWAN, WirelessHART and ISA100 offer advantages for specific IoT applications.
