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ZigBee Technology - The Home of the Future (13/12/2008)By Bob Heile, ZigBee AllianceWe are on the cusp of seeing a home network that will allow you to control almostevery aspect of comfort, security and utility within your residence, thanks to arapidly-growing wireless technology called ZigBee. Every room will be at an optimaltemperature all year long. Your utilities will 'sense' the most energy-efficient time of day to run. Your smoke alarm may go off in your basement, but you will beawakened by the one mounted over your bed when it is wirelessly triggered tosound. While some of this is already a reality, to a limited degree, with the help of wireless technologies, ZigBee will soon automate the entire home; unidirectional IRremote controls will become obsolete and homes of the future will run moreefficiently, more safely and more economically.ZigBee is a global standard for wireless connectivity, which is particularly useful forresidential control because of its reliability, low cost, long battery life and easydeployment. ZigBee's use of 'smart sensors' and mesh networking help providegreater control of almost every aspect of the home, including a variety of remotecontrol applications such as keyless entry, garage door openers and remote controlapplications.In addition to residential control, ZigBee technology is well-suited to a wide range of applications including industrial, medical and monitoring. Indeed any applicationthat requires interoperability and/or the RF performance characteristics of the IEEE802.15.4 standard would benefit from a ZigBee solution. The ZigBee standardWhile numerous wireless standards exist for high-speed data applications, none of these address the unique needs of remote monitoring and control for sensorynetwork applications in the way that ZigBee does. The ZigBee standard is built onthe IEEE 802.15.4 global standard. The ZigBee stack, which sits on top of IEEE802.15.4, adds an application services layer, security layer and the mesh networklayer to create the ZigBee standard. The combination delivers low complexity,
 
inherent reliability, long battery life and the ability for networks to formautonomously and maintain themselves without operator intervention.How ZigBee worksWhile ZigBee supports a variety of network topologies, including star, mesh andcluster networks, its mesh network design is a fundamental and differentiatingattribute. Enhancing the overall network reliability, mesh networking topologyincreases the number of pathways information can travel. If a device encounters aclosed path, it automatically seeks out another path to execute the action. ZigBeedevices will always know who they need to speak to, what they need to tell oneanother, no matter how many devices you have in your home.ZigBee's addressing scheme is capable of supporting over 64,000 nodes per'network coordinator', and multiple network coordinators can be linked together tosupport extremely large networks. The logical size of a ZigBee network ultimatelydepends on which frequency band is selected, how often each device on thenetwork needs to communicate and how much data loss or retransmissions can betolerated by the application. Additionally, ZigBee's capabilities allow for very lowaverage power consumption because the duty cycle of battery-powered nodeswithin a ZigBee network are designed to be very low. The ZigBee Alliance The technology is being driven by the ZigBee Alliance, an association of companiesworking together to enable wirelessly networked monitoring and control productsbased on an open global standard. It includes a rapidly growing list of over 175industry leaders from around the world including semiconductor manufacturers,wireless IP providers, OEMs and end users. The collaborative nature of the ZigBeeAlliance has helped to foster its success. Recently, the Alliance made thespecification publicly available to universities, research institutions and softwaredevelopers to review the technical details of the specification in its entirety. Thishas helped individuals and organisations gain a greater understanding of the valueof ZigBee to their wireless networking efforts. The opportunity to access and viewthe ZigBee specification directly from the Web transcends geographic hurdles ineducating people on the benefits of ZigBee-based wireless networks.
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