Radio Technologies are advancing fast, and are full of tradeoffs.
Below is a chart about long range technologies from silex technology.
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Simon Slupik has written much over the years contrasting Bluetooth with other IP based radio standards:
https://headworx.slupik.com/2017/12/z-wave-goodbye.htm
https://silvair.com/blog/zigbee-sting-still-sharp-revision-30/
https://silvair.com/resources/tale-five-protocols/
The two main short range standards (Bluetooth mesh and Zigbee) are different in that Bluetooth is not IP based and does not require a gateway. Some of Simon’s thoughts:
The reason for not running IP on capillary mesh networks is capacity. Non-IP transports are more efficient. Packets are more compact and the network can accommodate more of them. That translates directly into how many nodes (or, more precisely, how many messages per second the network is able to carry). More compact packets take less time on air, so more of them can fit on a single frequency at a given time period. Shorter packets also mean it takes less energy to generate and transmit them, so, for example, the transmitter may never need any permanent power source or a battery. Energy harvesting transmitters work like magic: a switch on a wall harvests kinetic energy when pressed. A sensor on a wall has a small photovoltaic panel sufficient to power it forever. An asset tag harvests radio noise and transmits an encrypted ID periodically.They are all magical products: wireless, no power required, work forever and do work reliably. Nothing like that is available today running an IP stack. IP requires more energy.
…
Can aircraft carry shipping containers? Sure they can. Are we using aircraft to carry shipping containers? No, because it is not efficient. Does it take extra effort to pack cargo into anther type of container that aircraft can carry more efficiently? Yes it does. It is called ULD, or Unit Load Device. Overall it all makes sense, from the capacity and power budget perspective. And some smaller aircraft do not use any containers, as they are simply too small to allow for such packaging. See the analogy?
Wireless is different. It is different because of the physics that define behaviors of radio transmissions. Applying wired way of thinking to wireless is just wrong. You cannot attach wings to a train and expect it to fly…
On the Zigbee side, you’ve had groups for years working on IP based solutions – Thread, Chip, and now Matter. There are big names behind these groups so something will likely eventually happen …
Some quotes from the Tale of five protocols paper:
Out of all low-power, low-bandwidth communication standards, Bluetooth has the best radio. Period. This might seem like a bold statement so we’re certainly open to discussion, but the facts really do speak for themselves. And why is the radio performance so important? Because of what the IoT is expected to become. Even today, when we think of e.g. commercial smart lighting systems of the future, one thing is certain - we need to think big. A smart office building of the future is a different story than a smart home of the future. And if Gartner predicts 500 smart nodes in a smart home, then how many smart nodes we should be prepared for in a smart office building? Thousands of them, including LEDs, occupancy sensors, photosensors, and looking even further ahead - potentially also all the smart components of e.g. the HVAC infrastructure. To get prepared for that, we need a technology that can provide extremely fast and reliable transmission of data, even in a network with thousands of nodes.
…
In terms of network robustness, Bluetooth Smart is head and shoulders above the rest. The secret to its performance is the fact that the protocol has been optimized to transport very large amounts of very small data packets. Exactly what is needed in IoT applications. First of all, it is capable of transferring data with a rate of 1 Mbit/s (and higher, but we’ll get to that later on). With its maximum throughput of a mere 100 kbit/s, Z-Wave can offer only one-tenth of Bluetooth’s data rate. All of the 802.15.4 radios, including ZigBee and Thread, are also significantly less efficient in this regard, as their maximum data rate amounts to 250 kbit/s. As for data packets’ size, it must be remembered that each data packet includes payload and overhead. The former is the essential data carried within a packet – the core message that is conveyed so that other network nodes can act upon it. The over-head is all the additional information that is required to make the message reach its destination. This includes security mechanisms, certain networking procedures, potentially also some sort of routing data (if a routing technique is applied). …
A quick look at matter’s Github:
Seems to be fairly active:
With contributors from a number of companies.
Documentation seems fairly sparse considering the effort that is being put into this project. tokei shows ~1.3M lines of mostly C++ code:
===============================================================================
Language Files Lines Code Comments Blanks
===============================================================================
AsciiDoc 2 961 719 16 226
GNU Style Assembly 1 241 126 104 11
Autoconf 7 38 38 0 0
Batch 5 347 259 0 88
C 148 98130 64298 24011 9821
C Header 1548 420192 262314 97205 60673
CMake 64 5140 3395 1019 726
C++ 1133 457051 346424 44369 66258
C++ Header 6 910 296 457 157
Dockerfile 25 988 672 193 123
Groovy 1 71 64 1 6
HTML 3 78 76 0 2
INI 8 234 205 3 26
Java 74 38490 31708 1404 5378
JavaScript 23 4193 2974 727 492
JSON 33 1568 1568 0 0
Kotlin 36 4441 3514 361 566
Makefile 6 634 276 267 91
MSBuild 1 8 8 0 0
Objective-C 21 53418 41203 524 11691
Objective-C++ 28 64931 57670 1725 5536
Perl 1 97 81 2 14
Prolog 5 84 72 0 12
Protocol Buffers 7 540 416 59 65
Python 191 70232 54414 3390 12428
Shell 78 5442 2913 1656 873
SVG 2 315 312 2 1
TCL 2 9 9 0 0
Plain Text 24 4192 0 3215 977
Visual Studio Pro| 3 428 428 0 0
Visual Studio Sol| 1 48 47 0 1
XML 144 19412 16925 1884 603
YAML 141 24021 18967 2118 2936
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Markdown 148 18927 0 13285 5642
|- BASH 5 305 275 11 19
|- JavaScript 1 1 1 0 0
|- Shell 4 121 116 0 5
(Total) 19354 392 13296 5666
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Total 3920 1295811 912391 197997 185423
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