Possible to support ZigBee and proprietary RF concurrently?

[whyeye]

Hi, we are developing a home automation product that needs to support ZigBee. However, at the same time I would like the devices to be able to work with a simple non-mesh RF protocol in case the customer does not have an existing ZigBee coordinator. Is this possible using Nordic SoCs?

Thanks.

[Hung Bui]

Hi Whyeye, 

As suggested by Andrew, you can consider running Zigbee and Bluetooth Low Energy concurrently. We have an example that work out of the box with this setup. You can have a look here: https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/sdk_tz_v4.1.0/zigbee_multi_examples.html?cp=7_3_3_8_4

More detail about the dynamic multiprotocol can be found here: https://infocenter.nordicsemi.com/topic/sdk_tz_v4.1.0/ble_154_multiprotocol.html?cp=7_3_4_0

Do you have a requirement on a specific proprietary you need to use or BLE would be a good option ? 

[whyeye]

Hi Hung,

Thanks for your reply. We would like to avoid using both ZigBee and Bluetooth mainly due to the high licensing costs. Is it possible to do dynamic multiprotocol with RF4CE? That might be another option for us.

[Hung Bui]

Could you clarify that you want to do Zigbee and RF4CE at the same time or only switching between the protocols ? 
You mentioned that the proprietary protocol is to be used if the customer doesn't have Zigbee coordinator. Would that meant RF4CE won't be used at the same time as Zigbee ?

If you only need to switch between the protocol I don't see a big issue here as both of them based on top of 802.15.4. 

[whyeye]

The main point is that Zigbee requires at least another ZC or ZR to be operational. In the case that a customer does not already have a Zigbee network at home, I would like to give them the choice of using the product directly from a remote control. Dynamic multiprotocol would obviously be the best as it wouldn't require the end user to do anything, but switched would be acceptable as well. In this case, I take it that it is only possible to implement multiprotocol on 802.15.4 based protocols?

[Hung Bui]

I don't see a reason for having them running concurrently. Switching should also work without user interaction. You can leave the device running in Zigbee checking for ZC or ZR for, let's say 30 seconds and then switch back to proprietary/RF4CE in the background. What important here is that if you need to have 2 protocols running at the same time or not. If not, then you are free to switch to any protocol you like after you checked that there is no current Zigbee network in the area. 

The challenge of having 2 networks running at the same time is that it requires timeslot mechanism to switch between protocols rapidly without interrupting the communication. It's not supported natively in the ZBoss stack that we used in nRF5 SDK for Thread and Zigbee. There is support for timeslot API in Zephyr (NCS) project here: https://github.com/nrfconnect/sdk-nrfxlib/blob/master/mpsl/include/mpsl_timeslot.h

But we haven't done any test on multiprotocol on that platform.