A Zigbee and Thread simulator for your IoT courses

A mesh network is hard to teach on a whiteboard: what matters — who relays whom, which link is weak, what happens when a router goes down — cannot be seen on hardware lying on a table. On the VirtIoT Lab map, every node has a position, every link has an RSSI and an LQI, and the topology rebuilds itself before the student’s eyes.

Students build a PAN with AT commands and follow what each node publishes. Joining is simplified: beacon scan and association are not simulated.

• Coordinator, Router and End Device roles, with a table of the neighbours within radio range.
• Per-link RSSI and LQI estimated from the distance on the map.
• ZCL attribute reports and reads, bindings and unicast sends between nodes.
• Join events, reports and frames published as JSON on a per-student MQTT topic.
• Network inspector: address, cluster and value of every exchanged frame.

Thread carries IP all the way to the sensor. Students see what that changes in addressing, security and the role of each node.

• Leader, Router, Router Eligible End Device and Sleepy End Device roles, reconfigured dynamically.
• IPv6 addressing and 6LoWPAN compression.
• Secure DTLS commissioning and Network Key distribution.
• A dedicated OpenThread Border Router instance bridging the Thread network and the IP infrastructure — the groundwork for understanding Matter over Thread.

Zigbee and Thread share the same IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer at 2.4 GHz. Working with one after the other, on the same map, lets students compare two ways of building a network on top of the same radio: a dedicated application stack on one side, native IP on the other.