Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, and Zigbee Network Performance Benchmarking

Bluetooth mesh , Thread, and Zigbee are popular mesh networking standards used to add wireless connectivity to building and home automation products. Silicon Labs conducted mesh network performance testing to help developers better understand difficult-to-predict wireless behavior and make more informed choices when designing products for the IoT.

Examining Mesh Networking Technology

Networking performance characteristics such as throughput, latency and the impact of network size on scalability and reliability are important factors to consider. Additional factors such as technologies used in different ecosystems, gateway interfaces and cloud connectivity should also be factored in when making a technology selection.

	Bluetooth Mesh	Thread	Zigbee
Market Focus	Lighting and Home Automation	Commercial/Industrial	Home Automation, Lighting, Metering
Maturity	Established 2017	Established 2015	Established 2003
Application Layer	Native Mesh Model	Flexibile support for IP-based application layers like dotdot, OCF and Nest Weave	Comprehensive Zigbee Cluster Library (ZCL)
IPv6	No	Yes	No
Cloud Connectivity	Smartphone (Temporary) Gateway	Border Router Gateway	Gateway
Ecosystems	None	Nest	Amazon, IKEA, Phillips HUE, Samsung SmartThings, Lowes Iris, Wink, Cox, Rogers, Deutsch Telekom (Qivicon) and others
Routing	Managed Flooding	Full Routing	Full Routing
Additional Notes	Beaconing, Direct Phone Connectivity	—	Most Mature

Comparing The Performance of Mesh Networking Standards

Benchmark Requirements

Utilize real-world environment with varying Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Zigbee network activity
Synchronize time stamps across all nodes in the network with Ethernet backchannel and packet tracing
Measure performance across varying throughput and latency configurations
Correlate energy measurements with wireless traffic for improved system characterization

Testing Network Performance

Tests were conducted using Silicon Labs’ Wireless Gecko SoC platform capable of running Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, Zigbee, and Proprietary protocols. Silicon Labs Bluetooth Mesh, Thread, and Zigbee software stacks were utilized. The test environment was a commercial office building with active Wi-Fi and Zigbee networks in range. Wireless test clusters were deployed in hallways, meeting rooms, offices, and open areas.

Benchmarking Results

Results Overview

Thread, Zigbee, and Bluetooth mesh perform similarly in small networks under small payloads
Thread and Zigbee outperform Bluetooth mesh when payload and throughput needs increase
Latency increases for all three as network size grows, but Bluetooth mesh experiences the largest increase
Selecting your IoT wireless connectivity solution should include additional criteria such as expected ecosystems and power consumption requirements
For large Bluetooth mesh networks relay optimization can be used to optimize performance
Bluetooth mesh works best when short messages (<=11B) are used especially for multicast messages

Throughput for 100-Byte Payload

Typical networks consist of two to three hops
Throughput varies based on number of hops
Protocol performance becomes similar as number of hops increase
Bluetooth mesh small packet payload results in reduced throughput

Latency over Four Hops

All protocols provide similar latency for very small payloads
Thread fragmentation (6LowPAN) achieves the best efficiency and latency performance as payload size increases
Zigbee has good efficiency but some application layer fragmentation
Bluetooth mesh latency degrades as payload size increases due to small packet size and resulting segmentation

Small Network with Small Payload

All three peak below 50 milliseconds (ms)
All spread up to 90 ms, well under the market target of 200 ms
Multicast for all protocols provides very high reliability

Small Network with Moderate Payload

Thread performs the best with latency up to 100 milliseconds (ms)
Zigbee performs well – most packets received with 80 ms latency, spreading up to 130 ms
Bluetooth mesh latency has the greatest variation, 20 to 200 ms

Large Network with Small Payload

Thread performs best with latency up to 100 ms
Zigbee performs well – most packets received with 80 ms latency, spreading up to 130 ms
Bluetooth mesh latency peaks at 60 ms, spreading past 250 ms
All 192 nodes were Bluetooth mesh relays and no relay optimization was used

Large Network with Moderate Payload

Thread performs the best with latency spreading up to 100 ms
Zigbee performs well – most packets received with 80 ms latency, spreading up to 130 ms
Bluetooth mesh latency peaks at 60 ms, spreading past 250 ms
All 192 nodes were Bluetooth mesh relays and no relay optimization was used