ZigBee for wireless networking

What is ZigBee?

The past several years have witnessed a rapid growth of wireless networking. However, up to now wireless networking has been mainly focused on high-speed communication applications such as the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) standard. Another well-known standard focusing on low-rate wireless personal area networks (WPAN) is Bluetooth, but it has limited capacity for networking since a Bluetooth piconet only can have up to 8 nodes. There are many wireless monitoring and control applications in the industrial and home environments that require less complexity and lower data rates than those from existing standards. For such wireless applications, a new standard called ZigBee based upon the IEEE 802.15.4 specification has been specified by the ZigBee alliance with members of Freescale, Philips, Atmel, Siemens, Samsung, Analog Devices and Texas Instruments. The ZigBee standard has the characteristics of large network capacity (up to 65,000 nodes), long battery lifetime (up to 10 years), short link establishment time (15-30 ms), but low data rate (up to 250 kbps).

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ZigBee-Ready Modules

The Communication Electronics group at Linköping University has developed ZigBee ready modules, for easy integration with e.g. temperature and humidity sensors to form a large sensor network. Data sheets of the ZigBee modules are available here:
1. ZigBee-ready module for wireless networking. This module has a line of sight range about 100 meters. It has an integrated antenna, but it has also an antenna connector for special external antennas, such as directional antenna with high gain. This module is suitable for being used as battery-powered wireless end-devices with various types of sensors.
2. ZigBee-ready module with both low noise and power amplifiers. This module has a line of sight range above 1,000 meters. The added low noise amplifier increases the receiver sensitivity, and the added power amplifier increases the radio output power. This module is suitable for being used as main-powered wireless rounters and coordinators. It has also a connector for external antennas.
3. ZigBee-ready temperature and humidity sensor module. This module has integrated temperature and humidity sensors and a line of sight range about 100 meters. This module is suitable for being used as wireless end-devices to monitor temperature and humidity.

Wireless Sensor Network for Cultrural Buildings

We have an on-going project supported by the Swedish Energy Authority. The purpose of the project is to study issues of saving energy while conserving cultural values of historical buildings, by utilizing the ZigBee wireless technology for automatic sensing, display and control. The following figure illustrates the data collecting system for the wireless sensor network. The system will perform various remote sensing of temperature, relative humidity, and air flow to collect data at different nodes in a building. The collected data will be stored in a local server database for a local overview at each site. The local server at each building will be connected to the main server through an Internet connection. If the Internet connection is not available at the local site, the sensor network can be connected via a GSM/GPRS connection to the Internet to upload the data to the main server. The data will be stored in one large database in the main server to make it accessible for clients who are interested in the data in a specific building.

Enlarged system overview

Reports

- A. Huynh, J. Zhang, T. Jaeger, Q. Ye and S. Gong, "Measurement Result
at Linköping Cathedral", Internal report available up on request, April 2009.

- A. Huynh, J. Zhang and T. Jaeger, "Measurement at Skokloster Castle", Internal report available up on request, May 2009.

- Anders Pettersson, Johan Nordlander and Shaofang Gong, "ZigBee-ready Wireless Water Leak Detector", Accepted for presentation at The Third International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications: SENSORCOMM2009, Athens, Greece, June 18-23, 2009.

- Elektronik i Norden: ZigBee-nät demonstreras.

- NCC Nyheter: Smart trådlöst nätverk för framtidens lägenheter.

- Johan Nordlander, "Efficient energy consumption at home utilizing wireless sensor network wireless network", Report to NCC, 2008.

- Anders Pettersson, "Wireless water leackage detector", Master thesis, 2008. Nominated to the student "Swedish Embedded Award 2008" after hard competition. The last competition among a few finalists left will take place at "Tekniska Mässan 2008" in Stockholm, 21 - 24 October.

- H. Ramazanali, J. Olsson, J. Lönn, A. Huynh, Q. Ye, and S. Gong, "Evaluation of Zig-Bee Networking in a Campus Environment", Accepted for publication in ISAST Transactions on Comunications and Networking, 2008.

- Johan Nordlander, "Data collection for an individual energy consumption measurement system using a ZigBee wireless network" , M.Sc. Thesis: LITH-ITN-ED-EX--07/006--SE, Linköping University, 2007.

- Johan Lönn, Jonas Olsson and Shaofang Gong, "ZigBee-ready modules for sensor networking", Proceedings of the REALWSN'05 Workshop on Real-World Wireless Sensor Networks, 2005.

- Johan Lönn and Jonas Olsson, "Zigbee for wireless networking" , M.Sc. Thesis: LITH-ITN-ED-EX--05/015--SE, Linköping University, 2005.

Contact

For more information about our ZigBee-related projects, our ZigBee-ready modules and our sensor network solutions, please contact Professor Shaofang Gong.