Table of Contents
Wireless Protocols Compared
Wired Protocols Still Run the Plant
The Decision Logic in One Pass
A practical comparison of IoT physical and data-link protocols circulated widely on EEWorld this week (Oct 20), and it matches what field engineers keep asking: with so many radios, which one actually fits my project? There is no universal protocol – selection is a trade-off across range, data rate, power and cost. Here is the decision map.
Wireless Protocols Compared
| Protocol | Range | Data rate | Power | Sweet spot |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WiFi | LAN, wall-limited | Gbps-class | High | Cameras, voice, gateways |
| BLE | 10-50 m | 1-2 Mbps | Ultra-low (coin cell years) | Wearables, provisioning |
| Zigbee | 10-100 m | 250 kbps | Low, self-healing mesh | Building lighting, factory sensing |
| LoRa/LoRaWAN | 3-15 km+ | 0.3-50 kbps | Ultra-low uA sleep | Agriculture, outdoor metering |
| NB-IoT | Carrier-wide | Low | Low | City-scale public deployments |
Wired Protocols Still Run the Plant
Wireless does not replace wires where determinism matters. RS232 remains the debugging classic (point-to-point, ~15 m); RS485 carries PLC and meter traffic up to 1200 m with strong noise immunity; CAN bus delivers hardware-level arbitration and error detection for robots and vehicles at 1 Mbps; industrial Ethernet anchors high-bandwidth, deterministic backbones. Modern gateways simply integrate all of them.
The Decision Logic in One Pass
Ask four questions. How far? Above 1 km: LoRa/NB-IoT; in-building: Zigbee/BLE/RS485. How much data? Video: WiFi/Ethernet; meter readings: LoRa/NB-IoT. Battery or mains? Battery pushes you to LoRa/BLE/NB-IoT. Real-time control? CAN or industrial Ethernet, period. Then let a gateway unify the winners into one platform.
EBYTE (Chengdu Ebyte Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.) covers every protocol in this map – LoRa, Zigbee, BLE and dual-mode Bluetooth, WiFi, NB-IoT and 4G modules, RS485/RS232/CAN converters, serial servers and industrial gateways – so one vendor can answer all four selection questions with certified hardware and SDKs.
FAQ
Q: LoRa vs Zigbee vs BLE: which for sensors?
A: LoRa for kilometers of range and years on battery (agriculture, metering); Zigbee for dense in-building mesh (lighting, factories); BLE for short-range wearables and phone connectivity. Distance decides first.
Q: RS485 or CAN for factory devices?
A: RS485: 1200 m multi-drop, ideal for PLCs and meters (Modbus RTU). CAN: hardware arbitration and error detection for millisecond real-time control in vehicles and robots. They coexist on modern gateways.
Q: Can I mix protocols in one project?
A: Yes – that is the norm. Sensors on BLE/Zigbee/LoRa converge into an industrial gateway that converts everything to MQTT/Modbus TCP over Ethernet or 4G.
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