2013 Ninth International Conference on Natural Computation (ICNC)
Combustible Gas Monitoring Based on Zigbee and
Network Building Techniques
Min Li, Yuduo Wang
School of Information and Communication Engineering
Being Information Science and Technology University
Beijing, China
Abstract— Most of traditional gas monitoring uses wired or
handled devices to transmit signals, while the complicated wiring
causes great inconvenience for power supply, signal transmission,
management and maintenance. To overcome these shortcomings,
the paper gives a wireless combustible gas monitoring solution
based on ZigBee technique using CC2530 chip which made by TI
(Texas Instruments) [1] as the master chip, in which the ZigBee
condense protocol is analyzed, network building solution is given,
the software for application layer and driver are designed, and
the real-time monitoring of combustible gas and selfish network
building of sensor nodes are completed. The study results
demonstrate that the parameters such as combustible gas
concentration, micro-seismic signal under the case of harsh
environment can be collected.
Keywords- ZigBee; Network building; CC2530; Combustible
gas monitoring
I. INTRODUCTION
The coal mine gas explosion is one of the biggest threats to
coal mine safety production. In recent years, a lot of coal
mining enterprises at home and abroad apply mature industrial
monitoring technologies to coal production, which has played
an important role to protect the safety of mining personnel. But
the majority of the monitoring systems are isolated, self-
contained, so the access of sensor nodes is not flexible enough.
At the same time, data acquisition has a feature of narrow
scope, low efficiency and poor linkage. According to the status
for coal mine monitoring system at home and abroad, and the
analysis for analyzing monitoring needs comprehensively, a
solution of monitoring and network building technique for
combustible gas based on ZigBee effectively is proposed in
this paper. With the use of tree network topology, the solution
expands the acquisition range, effectiveness and improves the
reliability of transmission of the node.
With the development of science and technology, more and
more attention is paid to the wireless communication network
technology. As a new kind of information acquisition and
management technology, wireless communication can reduce
the production cost, improve the productivity, and make use of
energy more effectively. In wireless system electromagnetic
wave is used as the transmission medium, and disadvantages of
cable transmission can be avoided in this solution, while cable
system’s costs are increasing in installation, troubleshooting,
maintenance and upgrade in spite of the advanced technology.
At the same time, wireless system is more flexible and practical
The paper is aided by Study on tracking and estimating system and
mating tools about horizontal well increasing-yield, The Item Number is
2011ZX05042-002-002
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Yunan Cao
Oil-gas Technical Service Co. Ltd.
Oil-chemistry Co. of China
Langfang, China
over cable system. For example, in mobile devices, the location
of the devices can be moved according the needs without the
restriction of cable. In addition, the volume of the sensors can
be reduced by decreasing the sensor attached on a large number
of transmission lines. ZigBee has the characteristics of lower
power consumption, stronger capability of extended network. It
has widely been used in the field of automatic control and
remote control, etc. It can satisfy the wireless network and
control of the small cheap devices. A system of combustible
gas monitoring and networking building technique is described
in the paper.
II. ANALYSIS OF ZIGBEE PROTOCOL
A. Main Features of ZigBee
ZigBee is a technical standard about wireless standard
developed by the networking, security and application software
ratified by the IEEE [2] (Institute of Electrical and Electronic
Engineers) 802.15.4. Different from other wireless standard
such as 802.11 or 802.16, ZigBee and 802.15.4 carries a
maximum transmission rate of 250Kbps limited data traffic
[3]. It is the new standard developed by IEEE working group
for short-range communications specifically, and it belongs to
wireless personal area network (PAN). This technical standard
includes three frequency bands. The first one is the 2.4GHz
frequency band which is universal. And it defines 16
independence communication channels. Its transfer rate is
250kbps. The second is 868MHz in Europe, it has 1 channel
and its transfer rate is 20kbps. The other one is 915MHz
frequency band in United States. Its transfer rate is 40kbps and
it has 10 channels. And the three frequency bands are ISM
frequency band exempting from license [4].
IEEE deals with low-level media access control layer
(MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocol, whereas ZigBee
Alliance standardizes to its network layer (NWK) and
application layer framework (API). Application-layer
framework includes application support sub-layer (APS), the
device object (ZDO) and the manufacturer-defined application
objects [5]. The characteristics of ZigBee protocol are as
follows [6]:
1) Saving device power: ZigBee can work for up to 6
months to 2 years in energy-saving mode.
2) Reliable communication: ZigBee uses the CSMA-CA
avoidance mechanism to avoid competition and conflict; MAC
layer uses a full acknowledgment mechanism, so each network establishment and responsible for the initialization of
transmitted packet must wait for the acknowledgment the network which determines the PAN ID number and the
information. communication channel. The coordinator must be a full
3) Strong ability of self-organization and self-healing for function device with the function of routing and data
networking:The ZigBee network node can sense node existing forwarding. The router must be a full device and has the
or not, determine connected and form a networking without ability of data routing. The terminal node can be a full
human intervention. The net has a function of self-healing and function device or a reduced device. As a child node of the
adjusting topology when a node increased or removed, or a network, it can only communicate with its parent node and
node’s position moved. So,it can ensure the entire system to without the ability to join any other node.
work properly. A. ZigBee Network topology
4) Low cost: The device complexity is low, and the ZigBee ZigBee supports three network topologies: start network,
protocol is free-royalty, working band is flexible, license-free tree network and mesh network, as shown in Figure 1.
at 2.4GHz, this can reduce costs effectively.
B. The data frame in wireless sensor network
The data transmission among the coordinator, routers and
end nodes must follow a certain format, so that it can guarantee
the accuracy and validity of the data. When the terminal nodes
send data to coordinator, the coordinator must know its device
characteristics and its data types. In this way, the corresponding
measures can be taken to avoid accidents according to the
characteristics of the devices and the data anomalies.
Therefore, the results of the data in transmission should be
stored with a predetermined format. Table 1 is the definition of
the data frame at network layer.

TABLE I. DEFINITION OF THE DATA FRAME

Frame Node Data

0XAAH checksum 0XBBH
type identification field

1) 0XAAH is a data frame’s start flag which is called the
Checksum is used for the data frame to verify whether the data
bit change or not in the transmission process by the parity bit.
2) Sensor nodes write their own short address’s low byte
in the domain of device identifies as a flag. So, the superior
network can find which device the data belongs to.
3) The data field is the main part of the data frame. Data
field includes several measurement parameters values defined
by system, such as gas concentration, temperature, humidity,
etc. And each parameter position is fixed, in order to verify
whether the data acquisition successes.
III. THE OVERALL SYSTEM DESIGN SCHEME
Zigbee protocol defines two types of physical devices
which are used to cooperate with each other. They are full
function device and reduced function device respectively. Full
function device can support any kind of topology structure,
and it can be used as a coordinator, a router or a terminal node.
The full function device has the function of the controller and
it can communicate with any kind of device. The reduced
function device supports the star network topology only. It
cannot be used as a coordinator or a router ， but it can
communicate with coordinator or router.
There are three kinds of network roles in the ZigBee
network: coordinator, router or terminal node [7]. A ZigBee
network has only one coordinator. It is the starting point of
Figure 1. Network Topology
By analyzing three network topology structure of ZigBee,
the following can be known: Star network is one of the most
simple network topology and there is only one coordinator and
one or more of the terminal nodes in the star network. The
terminal nodes can’t communicate with each other directly.
All nodes information must be forwarded by coordinator. If
the coordinator fails, the entire network will not be able to run
properly. The mesh network is a high-reliability detection
network and the routing information must not be transferred
along the tree path. The mesh network can provide a plurality
of data communication channels. Each full function device can
be thought as a router, which can achieve the function of
message’s routing forwarding. Therefore, once the device data
communication fails, there is another path for data
communication. This can greatly improve the reliability of the
data transmission. But network construction is complicated,
the needs for maintenance of network nodes information is
much more than tree network, and the cost is higher. A tree
network is composed of multiple simple star topologies. The
terminal node can be connected to coordinator or router.
Router provides two functions: the first one is to increase the
number of network nodes, the second is to extend the physical
scope of network. In the tree network, terminal nodes will
generally send the data to the router nodes. Then the routers

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complete the forwarding of the data, and the coordinator is the
network management defenders [8]. Compared with mesh
network, the structure of tree network is simpler, and the tree
network can also extend the range of network communication.
B. System network topology diagram
The system uses the tree network to finish monitoring
and networking. A router node is responsible for relaying and
uploading the data of child nodes. The coordinator can control
the energy range beyond the sensor node and expand
coverage. At the same time, the tree network is more reliable
than star network for data transmission. Compared with the
mesh network, the redundancy and the total power
consumption of the system can be reduced in tree network.
The system network topology is shown in Figure 2.
up mode, sleep mode and interrupt mode. Under the case of
power management the use of different low-power modes for
low–power application with a long life is allowed .
3) On-chip peripherals: The chip allows the designer to
develop advanced applications. It includes DMA channels, a
MAC timer, four oscillators used for system clock and the
timing operation, one general 16-bit and two 8-bit timers, an
infrared generating circuit, one 32 KHz sleep timer, 12-bit
analog-to-digital converter(ADC) with 8 input channels, one
AES128 coprocessor, a watchdog timer, a power-on reset
circuit, a brown-out detection circuit and 21 programmable
pins, etc .
4) Interrupt: There are 18 interrupt sources and has 4
priorities in its internal interrupt controller.
CC2530 chip functional structure is shown in Figure 3.
Vdd
Flash ROM Power Clock OSC
Dcoup1

Memory 8051 CPU

SRAM DMA
Arbitrator Core

Radio Register AES ADC

I/O controller
FIFO and Frame Control CDMA/CA USART1

Radio Data Interface USART2

Modulator Timer1

Timer2 MAC

Synthesizen
Frequency
RF Timer3
Chain
Figure 2. The System Network Topology Timer4

Figure 3. The Basic Structure of CC2530

IV. THE HARDWARE DESIGN OF ZIGBEE NODES

A. Chip Instruction of CC2530 B. The hardware design of ZigBee nodes

The CC2530 system-on-chip solution for 2.4GHz is
suitable for a wide range of applications. There can easily be
built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 based standard protocols.
This is a real piece of system solutions which can also ensure
the ZigBee network performance. The system meets the
network applications to the 2.4GHz band. It performs well in
network cost and power consumption of the nodes and it
satisfies the needs of commercialization. It integrates ZigBee
radio frequency (RF), memory and microcontroller on a single
chip. With the use of this node structure, the system not only
eliminates the trouble of connecting the processor and wireless
communication module, but also builds a strong network at a
very low cost. CC2530’s main function is as follows:
1) CPU configuration: Chip integrates the enhanced high
speed 8051 core, supports 256K flash program memory, 8K
data memory and hardware debugging. It also supports for the
lasted version of ZigBee 2007 Pro protocol.
2) Power supply: The range of power supply is from 2.0V
to 3.6V. It has three kinds of power management mode: wake
There are two parts in ZigBee node hardware design: the
wireless transmission module design and the testing module
design. The wireless transmission module includes the data
interface circuit, power supply filtering, crystal oscillator
circuit, reset circuit, etc. ZigBee node is the data source of the
system, and is primarily responsible for the data collection such
as the combustible gas concentration, temperature, humidity
and the other environmental and receives the control command
transmitted by the monitoring center. The testing module uses
the RS232 serial converter circuit to finish the network
functions and the testing performances. Finally, it realizes the
function of PC binding data, transmission of node’s and
network’s information or command [9]. The whole system
hardware architecture diagram is shown in Figure 4.

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 parent node is selected, and a network request is sent. If the
node is joined to the network successfully, the node is set to
sleep mode to wait for an interrupt. When sleeping time is
coming, response to an interrupt is executed and the node is
activated. Finally, the node starts to collect the data and sends
the data to its parent node. If sending data is failed, the
sending operation is repeated until the data is sending
successfully. The router is used to accept the endpoint to enter
the network, and collect and forward the data. Its network
Figure 4. System Schematics
flowchart doesn’t repeat here. The endpoint’s program
flowchart is shown in Figure 6.
V. THE SYSTEM SOFTWARE DESIGN
Y
A. Flowchart of coordinator node Initialize Send packets
Node success?
The coordinator is a full-function device (FFD) and the N
core of the network, which is responsible for the establishment
and the management of the network. The endpoints and Scan
routers can issue binding application signals and join the Channel
Send data
network after the coordinator sets up the network successfully.
It can receive data from routers and endpoints and complete
the data storage and processing. Finally, it sends the data N
Receive
receiving from RS232 serial to PC for further processing and Frame? Collect gas
analysis [10].The coordinator should always be in the active information
state, listening for wireless and serial data. Its design flowchart Y
is shown in Figure 5.
Join parent
node
Wake up node

Send network Y
request
N
Time interrupt？

N Join network
success?
Set sleep mode

Figure 6. Program Flow Chart of Endpoin

C. Part of Software Program Code

Figure 5. Program Flow Chart of Coordinator
B. Flowchar of Endpoints
The endpoint is responsible for the data collection such as
the gas concentration, temperature and the other parameters.
After the data is simply processed, it is sent to its parent node
through the wireless channel. The software workflow is as
followed: Firstly, the node initialization operation is carried
out, including hardware, protocol stack, interrupt. Secondly,
channel scanning is executed and it is determined whether the
node receives the beacon frame. If receiving is allowed, the
The Embedded Workbench is used as 8051 integrated
development environment in the system developing and the
open source C language streamline protocol stack introduced
by TI can be used to complete the procedures for the
preparation. The system modifies the code of application
layer, writes the code of the ADC collection and endpoint’s
information accepted by the coordinator. It has the advantage
of good portability and readability. The solution takes the
advantage of low-power mode, uses the event polling
mechanism, and each layer comes into the low power mode
after initialization. Once the event occurs, the system is
aroused up and the interrupt event handling starts.
Consequently, the system will enter low-power mode after the

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end of the interruption. In this software architecture the power basicRfConfig.channel = appSelectChannel();
consumption can greatly be reduced. int_enable(INTS_ALL);
After the devices is connected to the personal computer //enable all interrupts.
(PC), and when the software begins to run, the function (void appMode = appSelectMode();
main ()) is called. It is important to note that the essence of the //Select mode.
ZigBee protocol stack is operating system OSAL task if(appMode == MODE_TX)
scheduling. Therefore, the initialization of the operating //Transmitter application
system in the preparation is particularly important before the {
main loop processing functions begins. The protocol stack appTransmitter(); //No return from here.
work flowchart is shown in figure 7. }
Parts of the software program code are as follows: else if(appMode == MODE_RX)
void main() //Receiver application.
{
appReceiver(); //No return from here.
}
HAL_ASSERT(FALSE);
//Role is undefined .This code should not be reached.
}
VI. CONCLUTIONS
With the use of ZigBee’s wireless communication
technology, the system monitoring and networking for the
combustible gas concentration, temperature, humidity, etc. is
completed, the real-time and flexible wireless sensor network
is ensured. And the disadvantage of the wired data acquisition
system can be overcome. The results of the study show that:
with the use of the ZigBee wireless sensor network, the
solution is more convenient for the data’s automatic
collection, processing, analysis, and the solution has the
advantages of high reliability, a wide range of acquisition and
low cost. Meanwhile, the corresponding system has a good
portability.
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[3] Xiuli Ren, Haibing Yu, “Study of realizing technology on ZigBee
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Figure 7. Flowchart of Protocol Stack Application, vol.43, pp. 143–145, 2007.
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{ application,” Beijing: Beijing aeronautics and astronautics press, 2007.
basicRfConfig.panid = PAN_ID; [5] Zhiqing He, “ Development and research of constable gas monitoring
system based on ZigBee,” Shenyang university of technology.
// initialization wireless network ID number Shengyang: Master thesis, 2010.
basicRfConfig.ackRequest = FALSE; [6] http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/cc2530.html, “CC253X
halBoardInit(); User’s Guide [Rev.A],” June 2010.
//initialize board peripherals. [7] Doo Seop Yun, Sung Ho Cho, “A data transmission method in zigbee
if(halRfinit() == FAILED) networks using power efficient devices.advanced technologies
communications, pp.162–165, 2008.
{
[8] De Liu, “ ZigBee Net working technology based on CC2530,”
HAL_ASSERT(FALSE); Programmable Controller & Factory Automation, pp. 93-95, 2012.
} [9] R. Challooa, A. Oladeindea, N. Yilmazera, S. Ozcelikb, and L.
HalLedSet(1); Challooc, “An Overview and Assessment of Wireless Technologies and
//Indicate that device is powered. Co- existence of ZigBee, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi Devices,” Procedia
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//Wait for user to press S1 to enter menu;

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[10] Longkang Wang, Baisheng Nie, Zhang Ruming, Zhai Shengrui , and Li Engineering,vol.26, pp.2046–2414, 2011.
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