Jan/Feb 2006

Membership of the ZigBee Alliance has now passed 200 organisations and expanded to 24 countries in six continents. Original-equipment manufacturers and end-product manufacturers now represent 30 per cent of the global membership.

If this doesn't mean anything to you, it probably should. ZigBee is a new(ish) communication standard that can be used to make electronically-enabled devices "talk" to each other; and if the people behind it are right, it could be as pervasive in a few years' time as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are now.

In fact it has something in common with these standards. Like them, it uses the 2.4GHz frequency range, and has been ratified by America's IEEE (the technical standard is IEEE 802.15.4). It also borrows something from the old HomeRF standard, which was once touted as a potential rival to Wi-Fi, but lost its way three years ago when major developers such as Intel switched allegiance to Wi-Fi.

High-profile organisations are promoting ZigBee, including Honeywell, Motorola, Philips and Samsung, and you would also recognise many of the names of the 200 members.

 

Probably the biggest attraction of ZigBee for would-be adopters is that it requires very little power. That means it can be installed in devices drawing power from very small long-life batteries, which can then potentially be left alone for years at a time - perhaps forever, in terms of the device's own life expectancy.

It is therefore seen increasingly as the solution for those often-quoted applications in which your fridge talks to your TV set or your cooker to your vacuum cleaner - applications where Bluetooth may have looked like the answer in the past, but where arguably ZigBee has more attractions.

In the business world, an early use has been in applications such as remote monitoring of the functions of office blocks, warehouses and factories, or of the condition of product in storage. Tiny ZigBee tags linked to sensors and powered by "fit-and-forget" batteries can relay information wirelessly to a local hub, which in turn passes it on to a control centre somewhere else by GSM, GPRS or some other established comms technology.

Admittedly, ZigBee is slower than Bluetooth in terms of transmission speed - 200Kbps at 90ft, compared with up to 1Mbps for Bluetooth. But for modest applications that might not make much difference. And on the upside, its range can be greater - up to 250ft in theory.

As you would expect, the ZigBee Alliance is the organisation that draws together developers and interested parties, and has tasked itself with promoting the concept worldwide. It cites three key markets as its prime targets at the moment - home automation, building automation and manufacturing and process control.

That might seem to rule out mobile applications, but in the long run no one is placing any bets on how ZigBee will evolve, and whether it can offer attractions for local connections (tractor-trailer links, perhaps, where RFID is currently making inroads). If so, it also could have a role in the kind of tracking and remote applications where Bluetooth or older microwave-style technologies are currently favoured.

Incidentally, the word on the street is that the name ZigBee has exactly the origins it sounds as though it would: supposedly it refers to zig-zagging bees, conjuring up the picture of a complex, interweaving mesh of connections. So now you know.