Is Zigbee A Real Innovation?

[saurabh17g]

I am surveying various articles on zigbee and comparing it with other alternative technologies. I read application of zigbee as 'remotely monitoring various types of sensors for air conditioning, lightening, smoke alarms etc.' Also, zigbee is a low power, low data rate, low distance communication module. The first thing that strikes my mind is the RF transmitters/ receivers modules (available in readymade PCB types of variable carriers like 430MHz,330MHz etc). They are simple, low cost and easy to use as compared to zigbee. they would almost have same data rate. they can be easily used for the applications listed above. then why to use zigbee?

[telomere]

Zigbee transmission itself has stuff like error correction that the rx/tx pairs you're thinking of don't. And if you're buying Zigbee modules, then chances are that in addition to lower power, they come with some pretty powerful features like mesh routing, GPIO pins, ADC pins, PWM pins, etc..

I had to be rude... but if you read that many articles, surely you already knew that?

That's not to say that Zigbee is the be-all, end-all of RF tranceivers. It's a bit of a "Jack Of All Trades", if your application heavily favors one factor (cost, speed, low power, etc.) over another, then chances are that you can find something better suited than Zigbee.

[cdstahl]

what is your end goal?

keep in mind that zigbee's goal is to work in a mesh-networked environment at low power (and low data rates).

[srikanthsamaga]

I dunno much about zigbee, but a major problem in other ask receivers is interference.
In a college level competition I had seen many projects based on these ready-made rf modules had almost same frequency, so they were not working in the venue, since many modules were working at the same time.
Exception for this case is TIs cc2500 modules.