Developing A ZigBee Solution

ZigBee has become a huge buzzword in the wireless sensors industry. The ZigBee Alliance – formed in 2002 to create a global specification for reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wireless communications based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard – now includes more than 200 members, including such well-known companies as Freescale, Motorola, Mitsubishi, Philips, Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Honeywell. With the ZigBee 1.0 specification released in December 2004 and an enhanced ZigBee standard released in September 2006, the ZigBee standard is well on its way to market adoption. According to Bob Heile, chairman of the ZigBee Alliance, over 2 million ZigBee radio chips were sold in the last year – more than any other radio technology in this space.

By carefully defining the network and application layers of a ZigBee-certified solution, the ZigBee specification enables multiple vendors to develop independent wireless solutions that can interoperate with each other. This philosophy promises higher demand for ZigBee chipsets, which reduces chipset costs to OEM developers. This, in turn, will yield lower-cost solutions to systems integrators and end users.

Despite ZigBee's growing marketing presence and the increasing availability of compliant stacks and chips, many end users are still asking, "Where are all the ZigBee solutions?" While the ZigBee specification has been embraced by a variety of developers, end products are lagging the supply of chips and stacks. This is to be expected, in part due to the relative infancy of the specification. Designers must invest a great amount of time initially to understand the overall architecture of ZigBee, including the different layers, services, limitations, compliance testing, etc. As more developers invest resources to implement ZigBee-based solutions, limitations may be discovered and need to be addressed by the ZigBee Alliance. Resolutions made by the ZigBee Alliance must then be propagated to chip and/or stack developers, application developers, and finally, end users.

ZigBee has achieved great market visibility due to its claims of interoperability, design simplicity, low power, and mesh networking. This article will explore the current state of the ZigBee specification and will explain how to go about developing a ZigBee based solution. Much of the information included in this article was taken directly from MaxStream's experience in developing a ZigBee solution.