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What is ZigBee

Here’s a good synopsis of what ZigBee is and why it might matter. Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld posts a pretty no-nonsense synopsis of ZigBee in his blog:

ZigBee is a group of major sensor manufacturers, Ember, Honeywell, Invensys, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Philips and Samsung, plus semiconductor manufacturers, wireless IP providers, OEMs and users.

The goal is to take sensor technology mainstream by creating a standard for remote wireless monitoring and control.

To that end ZigBee proponents want the radio to be IEEE 802.15.4 with ZigBee adding the logical network, security and application framework.

Pretty simple. ZigBee is important because standards are important. But sensor/mesh networks are still quite far out, at least outside of military applications.

ime talking with startup Aetherwire on their sensor network applications, and since then they’ve been actually doing business with the military. Another startup, Weatherbug is pursuing sensor networks from a different angle - Weatherbug’s original business is providing weather forecasts drawn from educational weatherstations they’ve located in thousands of schools throughout the US. Schools get a fun hands-on teaching product. Weatherbug gets to offer highly granular weather forecasts. I met Weatherbug’s newest sales rep at Gartner Symposium, and he said Weatherbug is also talking with government agencies about unspecified projects, but these can be easily assumed to be sensor-related, such as testing for contaminants.

Sensor networks indeed contain huge potential, but the task of introducing sensors into the world is an enormous financial undertaking. Ephraim compares the cost of 802.11 chips ($9) and 802.15.4 chips ($3) - and that doesn’t tell the whole picture. The sensor network infrastructure is designed to support low-bandwidth “heartbeat” style communications - such as kiddie tracking - or for autonomous self organization - such as recognizing a new node and communicating peer to peer. Check out the open source TinyOS project, which supports embedded sensor net development.