Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, Thread, LoRaWAN, NFC, RFID, UWB, and industrial wireless — the strengths, limits, and real deployment tradeoffs behind why an engineer picks one over another.
No single wireless technology wins on every axis — range, throughput, power, cost, and latency all trade against each other, and the short-range technologies covered here sit at genuinely different points on that tradeoff space rather than competing head to head. This module works through why a warehouse picks UHF RFID over BLE for inventory, why a smart-home hub increasingly speaks Thread instead of Zigbee, why LoRaWAN can cover a whole county from a handful of gateways at data rates a dial-up modem would beat, and why a car's keyless entry system moved to UWB specifically to defeat relay attacks that plagued RSSI-based systems.
By the end of this module you should be able to match a deployment's real constraints — range, battery budget, node density, RF environment — to the right wireless technology, the same selection judgment Module 11's wireless networking content and Project 4's smart-city IoT network case study both put directly into practice.