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Zigbee and LoRaWAN are complementary, not competitors
LoRaWAN: long range (km), low throughput, multi-year battery. Perfect for distributed sensors (basements, parking, gardens).
Zigbee: short range (~10 m without mesh, 50 m with), comfortable throughput, sub-second latency. Perfect for dense sensors (every room in an apartment: presence, door/window contact, smoke), actuators (plugs, bulbs, valves), user buttons.
A modern smart building deployment combines both: LoRaWAN on the outdoor fleet, Zigbee in indoor spaces.
The Zigbee2MQTT bridge in practice
SensIa integrates with Zigbee via Zigbee2MQTT (Z2M), the open-source reference ecosystem. You install Z2M on a Raspberry Pi (or any ARM/x86 computer) with a USB Zigbee coordinator (Sonoff ZBDongle-P at ~25 €, ConBee II at ~40 €).
You configure Z2M to publish to your MQTT broker (Mosquitto on the same Pi or cloud). SensIa subscribes to the broker. Multi-tenant connection pool: (organization_id, host, port) — your private Mosquitto stays isolated from other SensIa organisations.
Auto-discovery of Zigbee devices
Z2M publishes a retained topic <prefix>/bridge/devices with the list of all paired devices. SensIa subscribes at startup and performs a reconciliation diff: new devices to register, removed devices to soft-delete.
For each device, SensIa resolves its profile via a curated lookup (vendor + model Z2M canonical, e.g. Aqara/WSDCGQ11LM → profile aqara/temp-humid-sensor), with a power_source heuristic that determines the appropriate inactivityTimeout.
IAS Zone: native life-safety alarms
The IAS Zone cluster (ZCL 0x0500) standardises alarm sensors: smoke detectors, water leak, gas, CO, magnetic contact, tamper, low battery.
SensIa bridges IAS Zone → AlertService: on each state change (water_leak: false → true), SensIa immediately creates an alert via the ISA-18.2 pipeline (no polling, edge detection). Severity mapping: life-safety → critical (smoke, gas), security → warning (tamper), maintenance → info (low battery). Receivers (SMS, email, webhook) fire per your routing tree.
Command queue: drive your Zigbee actuators
Drive a lamp, plug, valve from SensIa. The command goes through an outbox pattern: SensIa enqueues the command in provisioning_outbox (DB), the MQTT worker publishes it on <prefix>/<friendly_name>/set.
Desired ↔ reported reconciliation: SensIa waits for the device to confirm the state (expected_reported = {state: ON}), if no ack within 30s → alert iot.zigbee.command_no_ack. Cancel-previous: if you send two rapid commands, the 2nd cancels the 1st.
Multi-tenant partitioning of the MQTT broker
You self-host Zigbee2MQTT (on your local Pi), but SensIa is cloud. What level of isolation? Answer: multi-tenant partitioning at the broker level.
Each SensIa organisation has its own MQTT prefix (configurable in the onboarding wizard) — org-mneme-ai/zigbee2mqtt/<friendly_name> for instance. SensIa resolves topics by organization_id at the connection pool level, never cross-org. If you self-host Mosquitto, add TLS and ACL auth for network confidentiality (recommended in prod).