An Overview of Zigbee Technology and its Industrial Applications

Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Wireless technologies have been rapidly developed during recent years. Starting from military and industrial controls, it is now being widely applied in environmental monitoring and agriculture. Its advantages include the liability, simplicity, and low cost. However, there are many wireless monitoring and control applications for industrial and home environments which require longer battery life, lower data rates and less complexity than those from existing standards. For such wireless applications a new standard called ZigBee has been developed by the ZigBee Alliance. ZigBee is a technological standard created for control and sensor networks. It is one of the most popularly deployed wireless technologies in recent years because ZigBee is an open standard lightweight, low-cost, low-speed, low-power protocol that allows true operability between systems. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard specifies the PHY Layer and MAC Layer for low data rate wireless PANs. Although the ZigBee design specification includes security features to protect data communication confidentiality and integrity, however, when simplicity and low-cost are the major goals, security suffers. This paper gives an overview of the ZigBee technology including needs, device types, network topology, advantages, disadvantages and its applications.

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