point

December - 2016 - issue > CXO Insights

How will ZigBee Cope in the Internet of Things Era?

GM Krishna, Associate Director - Marketing, Avnet
Friday, December 30, 2016
GM Krishna, Associate Director - Marketing, Avnet
Headquartered in the U.S., from components to cloud, and from design to disposal,
Avnet accelerates the success of customers who build, sell and use technology by providing a comprehensive portfolio of innovative products, services and solutions.


Among various competitive wireless interconnection technologies in the Internet of Things (IoT) era, ZigBee has many advantages, such as low power consumption, low cost, high network capacity and strong security and it has been regarded as one of the wireless protocols with the most 'things connected'. However, when compared with other wireless technologies like WiFi, BLE and even Z-wave, ZigBee's larger adoption in recent years lacks the required momentum. ZigBee was invented to meet demands of a simplified, low-power and highly reliable wireless communication technology in the field of industrial and home automation. Its standard protocol is divided into physical layer, MAC layer, network layer and application layer.

One of the problems of ZigBee's overall market adoption boils down to its non-unified standards and protocols. The problem lies in the application layer as at the beginning of ZigBee development in order to meet the needs of different application scenarios, the ZigBee Alliance refined the application layer into different protocols such as: ZigBee HA, LL, BA, RS, HC and TS, responding to different market segments like: home automation, lightings, buildings, retail, health and communications and ZigBee devices with different application protocols could not be interconnected with each other. Furthermore, for a detailed application protocol, ZigBee is yet to be standardized, because it allows original equipment manufacturers freedom to add their own unique protocols resulting in the ZigBee devices following the same application protocol to talk in different 'language', thus unable to communicate or connect with each other.

As the IoT ecosystem gets more complex and more connected, the disconnection between the devices under the same application protocol will certainly create issues for the users resulting in high network deployment costs. In order to solve this connectivity issue, ZigBee Alliance has made attempts such as interconnection certification for ZigBee HA 1.2 compliant products. However, measures like this are always regarded as 'after-event remedy', and any real change should be made from the top-level design of the protocol. Therefore, the demands from all sides boil down to a single hope on the ZigBee 3.0 - the unification of alliance's wireless standards into a single unified standard providing seamless interoperability among the widest range of smart devices in the era of smart and connected devices.

ZigBee 3.0 also includes ZigBee Green Power (GP), which was originally developed as an ultra-low power wireless standard to support the energy-harvesting equipment, which are the devices that capture energy from the environments, such as motion, light, piezoelectricity, Peltier effect and etc., without using a battery. Its most common application is the lighting switch, where pulling of the switch generates energy and transmits a wireless communication packet to the lamp. GP is very effective for the devices that are only occasionally present on the network, because such devices can therefore join or disjoin from the network safely, allowing them to be shut down for most of the time.

Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook