Who is the ZigBee Alliance?

The ZigBee Alliance is a global ecosystem of companies creating wireless solutions for use in residential, commercial and industrial applications. The ZigBee Alliance companies work together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance membership comprises technology providers and original equipment manufacturers worldwide. Membership is open to all.

What are some examples of ZigBee applications?

ZigBee technology is well suited to a wide range of energy management and efficiency, building automation, industrial, medical, home automation applications. Essentially, applications that require interoperability and/or the RF performance characteristics of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard would benefit from a ZigBee solution. Examples include:

• Demand Response
• Advanced Metering Infrastructure
• Automatic Meter Reading
• Lighting controls
• HVAC control
• Heating control
• Environmental controls
• Wireless smoke and CO detectors
• Home security
• Blind, drapery and shade controls
• Medical sensing and monitoring
• Universal Remote Control to a Set-Top Box which includes Home Control
• Industrial and building automation

What are the advantages of joining the ZigBee Alliance?

ZigBee Alliance member companies can enjoy accelerated development cycles and enhanced product and industry competitiveness. ZigBee members are defining and creating new markets for interoperable wireless networks. By actively participating in the ZigBee Alliance, members have access to, and are able to influence, the emerging ZigBee specification. Members gain early access to ZigBee design information, development details, interoperability specifications and other companies with complementary skills and capabilities. In addition to helping define the specification, members enjoy networking with other market leading companies committed to providing interoperable wireless products and networks.

What are the IEEE 802.15.4 technical attributes on which ZigBee is based?

ZigBee-compliant products take full advantage of a powerful IEEE 802.15.4 physical radio standard and operate in unlicensed bands worldwide at 2.4GHz (global), 915Mhz (Americas) and 868Mhz (Europe). Raw data throughput rates of 250Kbs can be achieved at 2.4GHz (16 channels), 40Kbs at 915Mhz (10 channels) and 20Kbs at 868Mhz (1 channel). Transmission distances range from 10 to 100 meters, depending on power output and environmental characteristics

How does ZigBee compare to Bluetooth?

ZigBee was developed to serve very different applications than Bluetooth and leads to tremendous optimizations in power consumption. Some of the key differentiators are:

• ZigBee:
• Very low duty cycle, very long primary battery life,
• Static and dynamic star and mesh networks, >65,000 nodes, with low latency available,
• Ability to remain quiescent for long periods without communications,
• Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum allows devices to sleep without the requirement for close synchronization.

• Bluetooth:
• Moderate duty cycle, secondary battery lasts same as master,
• Very high QoS and very low, guaranteed latency,
• Quasi-static star network up to seven clients with ability to participate in more than one network,
• Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum is extremely difficult to create extended networks without large synchronization cost.

What kind of battery life can a user expect?

While battery life is ultimately a function of battery type, capacity and end-use application, ZigBee was designed from the ground up to support very long life battery applications. Users can expect multi-year battery life when using standard, alkaline batteries in a network supporting a typical application. For very low duty cycle applications of < 1%, such as Automatic Meter Reading, battery life may exceed ten years and be constrained by the shelf life of the battery.

Is there any truth to claims that WiFi and ZigBee cannot co-exist in the same space?

No. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for small companies with proprietary technology to attack standards through the use of questionable and unverifiable "data." Some companies only offer single channel, proprietary solutions and are limited to use only in certain countries. ZigBee is a robust, global technology that works as promised. Consider the following:

How is ZigBee addressing reliability?

ZigBee was designed for the hostile RF environments that routinely exist in mainstream commercial and industrial applications. Utilizing Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum with features including collision avoidance, receiver energy detection, link quality indication, clear channel assessment, acknowledgement, security, support for guaranteed time slots and packet freshness; ZigBee-compliant networks offer OEMs and vendors a highly reliable, standards-based solution.

How many nodes can a ZigBee network support?

ZigBee's addressing scheme is capable of supporting over 64,000 nodes per network and multiple network coordinators can be linked together to support extremely large networks. The logical size of a ZigBee network ultimately depends on which frequesncy band is selected, how often each device on the network needs to communicate, and how much data loss or retransmissions can be tolerated by the application.

What is the advantage of the ZigBee solution over proprietary solutions?

The main advantages include product interoperability, vendor independence, and accessibility to broader markets. Customers can expect increased product innovation as a result of the industry standardization of the physical radio and logical networking layers. Instead of having to invest resources to create a new proprietary solution from scratch every time, companies will now be able to leverage these industry standards to instead focus their energies on finding and serving customers.

How easy is it to develop ZigBee-compliant products?

Companies are able to easily and cost-effectively include ZigBee-compliant wireless networking capabilities into their products through the introduction of small, low power, wireless RF modules. The availability of standards-based hardware and software solutions dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of integrating embedded RF into the typical product design. Vendors provide software toolkits, including profile templates, to enable OEMs and end users to efficiently create application layer solutions at low cost and reduce time to market.

Why should I consider using ZigBee technology?

Customers will choose ZigBee when they require a standards-based wireless network solution that is simple to develop and deploy, is optimized for low cost, low data rate applications, and demands long battery life capability, robust security, high data reliability, and product interoperability. ZigBee’s tagline summarizes these characteristics, “Wireless Control that Simply Works”.