Zigbee vs. Matter over Thread:Understanding IoT Protocol Performance in Practice

[Submitted connected 4 Mar 2026]

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Abstract:The wide take of the Internet of Things (IoT) has positioned smart homes arsenic paradigmatic examples of distributed automation systems, wherever reliability, efficiency, and interoperability dangle critically connected the underlying connection protocol. Among the low-power wireless technologies disposable for this scenario, Zigbee and Matter complete Thread person emerged arsenic starring contenders. While Zigbee represents a mature, non-IP mesh networking solution, Matter complete Thread introduces an IP-based architecture designed to unify instrumentality interoperability crossed different ecosystems. However, contempt extended archiving of their creation principles, location is simply a deficiency of empirical, comparative capacity information nether realistic web conditions. This insubstantial presents a broad experimental comparison betwixt the 2 protocols, conducted connected a testbed built from commercially disposable hardware. The projected methodology focuses connected different cardinal capacity dimensions, specified arsenic scalability, responsiveness, and responsibility tolerance. The results uncover that Zigbee achieves a little baseline overhead and faster way recovery, making it much responsive successful fixed small-scale deployments. Matter complete Thread, conversely, exhibits superior scalability and robustness, maintaining unchangeable throughput and predictable latency crossed multi-hop scenarios. Overall, we item that Zigbee and Matter complete Thread embody chopped trade-offs betwixt agility, efficiency, and scalability.