Zigbee max devices

RE: Zigbee max devices

Marte Myrvold — Tue, 23 Jul 2024 12:20:10 GMT

Hi Alex,

Elfving is out of office, and I have been assigned to your ticket.

Our Zigbee solution is not able to support a network with 1000 devices.

Zigbee is very focused on stability and dependability. However, Bluetooth mesh networks are self-forming and self-healing, so it should still be reliable.
We have a blog post where we did some large scale Bluetooth Mesh testing, and you can see the reliability results here: Large scale Bluetooth mesh testing - Reliability measurements.

You can also add additional reliability features on top of the existing ones in the application layer.

Best regards,
Marte

RE: Zigbee max devices

Alex Johnson — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 08:17:12 GMT

I thought Zigbee is more reliable than BLE Mesh. I need a very reliable network cause I am working in healthcare.

RE: Zigbee max devices

Elfving — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 07:23:53 GMT

Hello Alex,

I see you've already gotten some help here. Any reason particular reason why you want to use Zigbee for this?

For a network of that size, especially when you are trying to go up to 1000 devices I would rather recommend a different protocol, like for instance BLE Mesh.

Regards,

Elfving

RE: Zigbee max devices

Alex Johnson — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 06:48:04 GMT

Yes. This is the difference. CC2562RB probably supports more devices. I will look into it. Thanks.

RE: Zigbee max devices

Eduard Iten — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 13:07:43 GMT

Well, we use CC2562RB as a coordinator in this setting with zigbee2mqtt. I don't know if thats a relevant difference.

With matter over thread, you can use all the ZCL-devices. I thought you are developing your own end device. But if your manufacturer uses an NRF as a base for the zigbee device, they should also be able to deliver matter/thread implementation.

RE: Zigbee max devices

Alex Johnson — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 11:14:52 GMT

I thought a coordinator cannot keep more than 200 devices registered on the same PAN ID, according to this constant here:

ZB_CONFIG_OVERALL_NETWORK_SIZE

Of course I will have a router for each 4-8 devices because the buildings are very large and to cover all areas I will need many repeaters.

I would look at Thread, thanks for the advice.But I could not find any pendants for Thread. The Zigbee Pendants (SOS Buttons) at least exist, although I will have to talk to the manufacturer to make a smarted one that does not talk only with network coordinator.

RE: Zigbee max devices

Eduard Iten — Mon, 15 Jul 2024 07:35:22 GMT

Hello Alex,

I just started to work on Zigbee. But in my company, we have a Zigbee Network with 2500+ nodes. A coordinator by itself can't support so many devices, but we have about 700 repeaters in this network.

Maybe you should consider thread to build your application (also works with nRF52840). We are planning to migrate the mentioned network to thread. Reason is that the coordinator in the Zigbee network is a single point of failure. With thread, we can have many border routers (otbr), so we have redundancy of the connection to the ethernet.

Regards, Edi