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Standards & bodies

IEEE 802.15.4

The IEEE standard for low-rate wireless personal area networks that defines the radio and medium access layers used by Zigbee, Thread, 6LoWPAN and Wi-SUN.

IEEE 802.15.4 specifies how low-power radios share a channel: the physical layer, including the common 2.4 GHz and sub-GHz bands, and the MAC layer that handles frames, addressing and basic security. It deliberately stops there. Higher-layer stacks such as Zigbee, Thread and 6LoWPAN build networking and application behavior on top of it, which is why devices from those ecosystems share radio chips but do not interoperate by default.

For IoT designers the standard means small frames, low data rates and very low power, suited to sensors that send a few bytes and sleep. The trade-off against Wi-Fi is throughput and range per hop, which mesh networking compensates for. Knowing which 802.15.4 variant a chip supports, including the sub-GHz options used by Wi-SUN, determines which stacks it can run.

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