Questions about "Xbee Zigbee Modules"

XBee & XBee Gateway XBee - DigiMesh
1

Hi,

I’m a new Xbee user. I’m gonna know the differences among "Xbee Zigbee Modules ", “Mesh Modules” and “Point-to-Multipoint RF Modules”. If I want to use RF to realize that each Zigbee can send information to all other Zigbees (the number of Zigbees >3), and receive information from these Zigbees ( the number of Zigbees > 3), is it suitable to choose “Xbee Zigbee Modules”?

Sincerely,
Ruofan

2

The big/obvious differences:

  1. ZigBee:
    a) is standard, so other vendor chips can interface
    b) has rather ‘serious’ broadcast rules so that each broadcast intefers with the network for up to 5 seconds.
    c) sleeping devices do NOT mesh - they are point-to-multipoint (pt-to-mp) with a fully awake parent
    d) due to “c)”, you need to maintain enough powered devices - 8 sleepers to 1 powered devcie is safe ratio.
    e) tends to be the lowest power dueing sleep

Mesh Modules usually mean DigiMesh:
a) is Digi proprietary
b) supports ‘sleeping routers’, meaning every device must wake at same time and cooperate with the ‘mesh’
c) due b), eats more battery life because clocks need to be more accurate during sleep, plus all devices need to remain awake long enough to help mesh routing

Point-to-Multiple:
a) hub design, or more accurately, any 2 nodes wishing to talk must have radio line-of-sight
b) there is no mesh, forwardinf, or routing
c) these units tend to be higher-power radio units
d) since there is no route-discovery, data flow is very predictable - for example 40-50msec latency is possible.