ZigBee Technology in Future Data Communication System

Richa Deolia, Jyoti Godara, Neha Agrawal

MCA,VIT University, Vellore(India)
Richadeolia24@gmail.com,jyotigodara@gmail.com,neha_87in@yahoo.co.in

Abstract-

ZigBee is an IEEE 802.15.4 standard for data communications with business and consumer devices. It is designed around low-power consumption allowing batteries to essentially last forever. The ZigBee standard provides network, security, and application support services operating on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) wireless standard. It employs a suite of technologies to enable scalable, selforganizing, self-healing networks that can manage various data traffic patterns. ZigBee is a low-cost, lowpower, wireless mesh networking standard. The low cost allows the technology to be widely deployed in wireless control and monitoring applications, the low power-usage allows longer life with smaller batteries, and the mesh networking provides high reliability and larger range.ZigBee has been developed to meet the growing demand for capable wireless networking between numerous low-power devices. In industry ZigBee is being used for next generation automated manufacturing, with small transmitters in every device on the floor, allowing for communication between devices to a central computer. This new level of communication permits finely-tuned remote monitoring and manipulation.

that allow multiple OEM vendors to create interoperable products. The current list of application profiles either published or in the works are: Home Automation ZigBee Smart Energy Telecommunication Applications Personal Home The relationship between IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee is similar to that between IEEE 802.11 and the Wi-Fi Alliance. For non -commercial purposes, the ZigBee specification is available free to the general public. An entry level membership in the ZigBee Alliance, called Adopter, costs US$ 3500 annually and provides access to the as-yet unpublished specifications and permission to create products for market using the specifications. ZigBee is one of the global standards of communication protocol formulated by the relevant task force under the IEEE 802.15 working group. The fourth in the series, WPAN Low Rate/ZigBee is the newest and provides specifications for devices that have low data rates, consume very low power and are thus characterized by long battery life. Other standards like Bluetooth and IrDA address high data rate applications such as voice, video and LAN communications. ZigBee devices are actively limited to a through-rate of 250Kbps, compared to Bluetooth's much larger pipeline of 1Mbps, operating on the 2.4 GHz ISM band, which is available throughout most of the world.In the consumer market ZigBee is being explored for everything from linking

Keywords: Medium Access Control (MAC),

Physical Layer (PHY), Wireless Personal Area Networking (WPAN), Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)

1. INTRODUCTION
ZigBee is an established set of specifications for wireless personal area networking (WPAN), i.e. digital radio connections between computers and related devices. WPAN Low Rate or ZigBee provides specifications for devices that have low data rates, consume very low power and are thus characterized by long battery life. ZigBee makes possible completely networked homes where all devices are able to communicate and be controlled by a single unit. The ZigBee Alliance, the standards body which defines ZigBee, also publishes application profiles

low-power household devices such as smoke alarms to a central housing control unit, to centralized light controls. The specified maximum range of operation for ZigBee devices is 250 feet (76m), substantially further than that used by Bluetooth capable devices, although security concerns raised over "sniping" Bluetooth devices remotely, may prove to hold true for ZigBee devices as well. Due to its low power output, ZigBee devices can sustain themselves on a small battery for many months, or even years, making them ideal for install-and-forget purposes, such as most small household systems. Predictions of ZigBee installation for the future, most based on the explosive use of ZigBee in automated household tasks in China, look to a near future when upwards of sixty ZigBee devices may be found in an average American home, all communicating with one another freely and regulating common tasks seamlessly. The ZigBee Alliance has been set up as an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. Once a manufacturer enrolls in this Alliance for a fee, he can have access to the standard and implement it in his products in the form of ZigBee chipsets that would be built into the end devices. Philips, Motorola, Intel, HP are all members of the Alliance . The goal is to provide the consumer with ultimate flexibility, mobility, and ease of use by building wireless intelligence and capabilities into every day devices. ZigBee technology will be embedded in a wide range of products and applications across consumer, commercial, industrial and government markets worldwide. For the first time, companies will have a standardsbased wireless platform optimized for the unique needs of remote monitoring and control applications, including simplicity, reliability, low-cost and low-power. The target networks encompass a wide

range of devices with low data rates in the Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) radio bands, with buildingautomation controls like intruder/fire alarms, thermostats and remote (wireless) switches, video/audio remote controls likely to be the most popular applications. So far sensor and control devices have been marketed as proprietary items for want of a standard. With acceptance and implementation of ZigBee, interoperability will be enabled in multi-purpose, self-organizing mesh networks.

2. ZIGBEE TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW

The ZigBee technology is designed to provide a simple and low-cost wireless communication and networking solution for low-data rate and low-power consumption applications, such as home monitoring and automation, environmental mon-itoring, industry controls, and emerging low-rate wireless sensor applications. Figure 1 illustrates the architecture of the Zigbee protocol stack. ZigBee classifies devices into two classes: full function devices (FFDs) and reduced function devices (RFDs). FFDs are expected to be the more powerful nodes in a ZigBee network. They participate in functions such as core network for-mation and data relaying. Also, typically they are expected to be on at all times. RFDs attach to the ZigBee networks via FFDs. They only communicate to their corresponding FFDs in a controlled manner. Hence, RFDs can have very simple software. In addition, RFDs often can go to sleep to save battery power and allow their corresponding FFDs to handle communications on their behaviors. In a ZigBee network, devices may take on one of three roles: End device an FFD or an RFD that exe-cutes applications and does not have a child node is an end device. Router an FFD that can relay messages and usually, has both child nodes and parent nodes. Coordinator an FFD that

controls a ZigBee network, which also can be a gateway to the external world, a trust center, and an access authenticator, all in one.

3. ZIGBEE/IEEE 802.15.4 PHY

IEEE 802.15.4 [3] PHY supports unlicensed industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) radio frequency (RF) bands including 868 MHz, 915 MHz, and 2.4 GHz. Although sub-GHz bands have a longer communication range (at the same transmission power) and better penetration characteristics, compared to the 2.4-GHz band, these bands are regional. On the other hand, the 2.4-GHz band is globally available. Moreover, when operating in a sub-GHz band, as specified in the original IEEE 802.15.4-2003 standard, ZigBee supports only very low data rates. Hence, a majority of the first wave ZigBee products use the 2.4-GHz band. ZigBee communication uses direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS). With each 4-bit data block being mapped to a 32-bit pseudo-random sequence at 2M-chip/s and offset quadrature phase shift keying (OQPSK) in 2.4-GHz band, the ZigBee data rate is 250 Kbps. In total, 16 5-MHz wide channels are available in a 2.4-GHz band for ZigBee.

Figure 1: Block diagram of ZigBee layers

4.ZIGBEE/IEEE 802.15.4 MAC

In the MAC layer, there are two options for medium access: beacon-based and nonbeacon-based. In the non-beacon scenario, there is no time synchronization among the ZigBee devices. Devices access the channel using carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA). Each transmitter is required to assess the channel before transmitting. If the channel is detected as busy, the transmitter backs off and senses the channel again at the end of the back off window. IEEE 802.15.4 MAC also provides link layer data acknowledgement (ACK) and retransmission functions. The beacon-based access divides airtime into units of fixed length known as superframes, each of which is confined by two consecutive beacons and consists of up to three periods: a contention access period (CAP), an optional contention free period

Figure 2: ZigBee topologies Each ZigBee network has one coordinator but can have multiple routers and end devices. Like end devices, routers and the coordinator may execute their own sensor/controller applications. ZigBee supports multiple multihop network topologies, as illustrated by Fig. 2.

(CFP), and an inactive period. The CAP and CFP contain a number (16 by default) of equally sized time slots. A beacon frame must be transmitted at the first slot. The slots in CFP are called guaranteed time slots (GTS), which can be allocated by the personal area network (PAN) coordinator to support urgent real-time applications. During CAP, the channel is accessed using slotted CSMA/CA. Typically, the beacon-based access is used only in networks structured as star and cluster tree topologies as shown in Fig. 2, whereas the flat mesh topology networks use non-beacon access. The star and cluster tree topologies are not as flexible and robust for use in a mesh topology. Also, because it is difficult to add network structure and time synchronization, which is required by the beacon-based approach atop of the self-organized and potentially large ZigBee mesh networks, virtually all commercially available ZigBee systems currently sup-port only non-beacon MAC access. Hence, in this article, we focus on studying the feasibility of voice communication over non-beacon ZigBee networks.

coordinator node. For structured topologies, such as a cluster tree, the short addresses are allocated in a mask-able fashion similar to that of the IP addressing. This addressing scheme reflects the hierarchical nature of the topology. Also, in structured ZigBee networks, scheduling of beacon transmissions is used to guarantee that each device is allocated a slice of time for contention-free channel access. As a result, it is obvious that the beacon interval will be much larger than the super frame duration for the network with a large node density. In the beacon-enabled mode, a coordinator broadcasts beacons periodically to synchronize the attached devices. In the non-beacon-enabled mode, a coordinator does not broadcast beacons periodically but may uncast a beacon to a device that is soliciting beacons. With ZigBee routing, an end-to-end path can be established, and data can be transmitted successfully from the source to the destination. There are three routing approaches in ZigBee. The first one is hierarchical routing, which relays data frames through the tree structure that is formulated when devices (re-)join the network through association. This tree topology, for example, the star and the cluster tree in Fig. 2, is routed from the ZigBee coordinator. The hierarchical routing works as follows: Data frames climb up the tree from the source device toward the ZigBee coordinator.
If the destination device is between the

5. NETWORK LAYER PROTOCOL

ZigBee has multihop store-and-forward capability designed as an integral part of the system. This function is implemented within the network layer. In addition to forwarding data, the ZigBee network layer protocol also deals with issues such as: devices joining and leaving the network, configuring new devices, device addressing, and neighbor and route discovery. Multiple service primitives are defined to enable a device to join (or leave) the network through invocation of MAC layer association or disassociation. Each ZigBee device is identified by a unique 64bit IEEE address. In addition, after joining a ZigBee network, a ZigBee device is assigned a 16-bit short network address for intra-network communications. Admission control and address management of a ZigBee network are performed by its

source device and the ZigBee coordinator, data frames will be received by the destination device; otherwise, data frames will go down the tree from the ZigBee coordinator until arrival at the destination device. This kind of routing does not require dedicated routing protocol, but the disadvantage is that it usually takes a long path to climb up and go down through the tree. In addition to the previous hierarchical routing, ZigBee provides a requestresponse-based routing protocol derived

from the Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) [4] routing algorithm. There are two major commands in this routing protocol: route request (RREQ) and route reply (RREP). RREQ is broadcast hop-by-hop beginning at the source device and rebroadcast by intermediate devices until it reaches the destination device, which in turn will generate RREP, which traverses the reverse path of that of the RREQ back to the source device. When RREP reaches the source device, a route is established. The difference between the ZigBee routing protocol and the original AODV protocol is that ZigBee routing attempts to select a route with the least cost other than the least number of hops. In order to do this, ZigBee specifies a field in the RREQ called path cost, defined as the sum of link cost. Each inter-mediate device calculates its link cost and accordingly, updates the path cost field when RREQ is rebroadcast. As a result, the destination device, when it receives RREQ, can know the cost of the route through which the RREQ is coming and is able to choose the route with the least cost and notify the source device by sending back the RREP via the reverse path of the least cost path. Additionally, the path cost field can be utilized by intermediate devices to filter and avoid unnecessary RREQ broadcast. In ZigBee, the cost of a link l, (C (l)) is an integer-valued parameter in the range of [0, 7], defined as follows: C (l) = 7 or min (7, round (power(pl, 4))) (1) where pl is defined as the probability of packet delivery on the link l . The third routing approach is sourcerouted data transmission. The route record command is designed so that the destination device of this command can record a whole route through the network and construct the source route table, which can be utilized later by this device to perform source-routed data transmission.

6. ZIGBEE APPLICATIONS
Most common applications that ZigBee technology advocates are based on medical, residential, and industrial control and monitoring. Examples include: lighting controls, automatic meter reading, wireless smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) detectors, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and heating control, home security, environmental controls, medical sensing and monitoring, universal remote control to a set-top box, and industrial automation. Generally speaking, ZigBee is designed to transmit low-rate data with low-energy consumption within a short-distance. Originally, it was not intended for voice transmission. However, if ZigBee nodes already are deployed in an area for sensing and control applications, they pro-vide a communication infrastructure that may become valuable to tap into for other applications under special circumstances. To this end, we study the feasibility of carrying non-secure VoIP and PTT communications over standard ZigBee networks.

7. VOICE OVER ZIGBEE

In this section we introduce voice quality evaluation methodology and then survey the recent schemes that support streaming voice over ZigBee. SPEECH QUALITY Subjective Rating Traditionally, the telecommunications industry has measured voice performance in terms of customer ratings of speech quality on a five-point scale, where an excellent rating is given a score of 5; good, a 4; fair, a 3; poor, a 2; and bad, a 1 . Different approaches have been used to translate these ratings into an overall single measure from which speech quality can be judged. A popular approach is to calculate the arithmetic mean of scores known as a mean opinion score (MOS). A MOS ranges from a minimum of 1 to a maxi-mum of 5. A MOS of 4.0 or higher is considered toll quality, and a

lower limit of 3.0 is suggested for usable telephony. ITU-T E-model (R-factor) A well known and widely used approach for evaluating voice quality is the E-model defined in International Telecommunication UnionTelecommunication (ITU-T) Rec. G.107.The E-model combines individual impairments (loss, delay, echo, codec type, noise, etc.) due to both the signal properties and the network characteristics into a single, overall measure of conversational voice quality called the rating factor (Rfactor). This quantity is defined as follows: R = 100 Is Id Ief + A, (2) where Is is the signal-to-noise impairment, Id is the impairment associated with the mouth-to-ear delay of the path, Ief is the equipment impairment factor that captures the effect of information loss due to both the encoding scheme and to packet loss, and A is the expectation factor. For a G.729a voice codec scheme with the assumption of random packet loss, the previous equation is simplified as the following expression:

R > 100 corresponds to MOS = 4.5; 0 < R < 100 corresponds to MOS = 1 + 6

0.035R + 7 10 R(R-60)(100-R).

It is obvious that the higher R is, which implies smaller d and smaller e, the higher the MOS is that will be obtained. An Rfactor between 50 and 60, 60 and 70, 70 and 80, 80 and 90, or 90 and 100 indicates poor, low, medium, high, or best voice quality, respectively. VOICE OVER ZIGBEE The performance of ZigBee networks has been extensively investigated. However, those studies are not specific to voice quality. This reported how they extended their Firefly ZigBee work to pro-vide realtime voice communication capability for underground miners separated by long tunnels. However: The Firefly node has an additional AM radio interface for time synchronization, a highly specialized design that is not applicable to general ZigBee devices. Firefly communication is based on a non-standard time division multiple access (TDMA)-based link protocol designed specifically for linear network topology; it is difficult to generalize the approach to a standard ZigBee network of any topology. Our interest in the feasibility of conducting voice communication over commercial offthe-shelf (COTS) ZigBee hardware, where the normal operating mode is non-beaconenabled, unsynchronized, and unslotted CSMA/CA. Several characteristics of ZigBee technology can affect its capability of carrying voice communications. First, ZigBee networks have limited bandwidth only up to 250 Kbps. This limitation confines the maximum number of supportable voice calls or sessions. Second, channel access contentions in ZigBee networks are resolved by the CSMA/CA protocol, which inevitably introduces additional waiting time for transmissions and leads to smaller effective bandwidth and increased delay both could degrade the quality of voice communications. In addition, to maintain the advantage of low

where H(.) is the Heaviside step function, and d is the one-way mouth-to-ear delay that consists of three components: the delay associated with the codec (dcodec), the delay associated with the dejitter buffer introduced to smooth out the delay variation (djitterbuffer), and the one-way transit delay across the IP transport network (dnetwork). Variable (e) represents loss probability including loss in the IP transport network (enetwork) and the loss resulting from the dejitter buffer at the decoder (ejitterbuffer), provides a simplified method to calculate the previous components in d and e, based on the metrics at the transport level. R and MOS are related as follows : R < 0 corresponds to MOS = 1;

cost, a ZigBee node usually has low-gain antenna design, limited computation capability, and limited buffer size, which can affect the voice quality as well.

8. PERFORMANCE OF VOIP
Each full-duplex VoIP connection is simulated by two constant bit-rate (CBR) flows of opposite directions. The parameters of the CBR flows follow those of the G.729a codec: 20 bytes of data every 20 ms interval. Adding RTP, UDP, and IPv4 headers, each VoIP packet becomes 60 bytes long. Using IPv4/UDP/RTP header compression (e.g., IETF RFC 3095 [10]), a 40-byte IPv4/UDP/RTP header can be compressed to only one byte. In our study, we consider both cases: with header compression (W/HC) and without header compression (W/O HC). The distance D is set to eight meters. Buffer size in every node is 50 packets with first input first output (FIFO) queuing and tail-drop discipline. R-factor is used to measure the quality of VoIP. To calculate the R-factor, a dejitter buffer of six packets is applied. Table 1 presents the resultant R-factor (Eq. 3) for different configurations. From these results, it can be concluded that: Between two directly connected nodes, two (or three, if header compression is in use) G.729a VoIP calls of medium voice quality can be supported. For two hops, if a hidden terminal problem can be avoided, that is CSR is at least twice that of TXR, one VoIP call can be support-ed. When the number of hops exceeds three, support of G.729a VoIP on ZigBee net-works becomes unreliable.

Table 1: R-factor of VoIP over linear ZigBee Networks

9. SECURITY
Security and data integrity are key benefits of the ZigBee technology. ZigBee leverages the security model of the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC sub layer which specifies four security services: access controlthe device maintains a list of trusted devices within the network data encryption, which uses symmetric key 128-bit advanced encryption standard frame integrity to protect data from being modified by parties without cryptographic keys sequential freshness to reject data frames that have been replayed the network controller compares the freshness value with the last known value from the device and rejects it if the freshness value has not been updated to a new value.

ZigBee security is offered at several levels. Link level security, designed by the IEEE 802.15.4, provides security services for access control, message integrity, message confidentiality, and replay protection. In addition, ZigBee provides a message integrity check. When security is enabled, IEEE 802.15.4 data is encrypted using a particular mode of the 128-bit AES, that is, AES-CTR, AESCBC-MAC, or AES-CCM, depending on security requirements. In addition, ZigBee supports network-level security by applying AES encryption using network-wide key. Application-layer security also can be provided with pair-wise key established between the communicating peers. ZigBee security is generally considered adequate for its applications.

REFERENCES
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R. G. Cole and J. H. Rosenbluth, Voice over IP Performance Monitoring, ACM Comp. Commun. Rev., Apr. 2001.

10.CONLUSION
It is likely that ZigBee will increasingly play an important role in the future of computer and communication technology. The IEEE 802.15.4 based ZigBee is designed for remote controls and sensors, which are very many in number, but need only small data packets and, mainly, extremely low power consumption for (long) life. Therefore they are naturally different in their approach to their respective application arenas. It provides an overview of the ZigBee technology and investigates the feasibility of full-duplex VoIP communications support over simple network topologies. The Rfactor, end-to-end delay, jitter variation, and packetloss ratio also were described. Our findings indicate that although two directly connected ZigBee nodes can sup-port up to three VoIP, a VoIP conversation is possible for at most, two hops in a linear configuration for a reasonable R-Factor. ZigBee technology is designed to best suit these applications, for the reason that it enables reduced costs of development and very fast market adoption.

IEEE 802.15.4, IEEE Standard for Information Technology Telecommunications and Information Exchange Between Systems Local and Metropolitan Area Net-works Specific Requirements Part 15.4: Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Net-works (LRWPANs), Oct. 2003. [3] C. Perkins, E. Belding-Royer, and S. Das, Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) Routing, IETF RFC 3561, July 2003. [4] ITU-T Rec. G.107, The E-Model, A Computational Model for Use in Transmission Planning, Dec. 1998. [5] J. Zheng and M. J. Lee, A Comprehensive Performance Study of IEEE 802.15.4, Sensor Network Operations, IEEE Press, Wiley Interscience, Ch.. 4, 2006, pp. 21837. [6] Behrouz A. Frouzan, Data Communication, Third Edition, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing company Limited, 2004, Pp 19-110. [7] Andrew S. Tenenbaum, Computer Networks, Fourth Edition Pearson Publication Limited, 2003, Pp 21-89. [8] William Stalling, Wireless Communication and Networks, Fourth Edition, Pearson Publication Limited, 2004, Pp 39-118. [9] http://www.zigbee.org/en/documents/zigbeeoverview4.pdf

[10] http://www.palowireless.com/zigbee/tutorials.asp

[11] http://www.zigbee.org/en/resources