What is ZigBee and what can it do for me?

If you’re reading this document, you probably already have some idea what ZigBee is and what it can do for you. But we’ll review just in case you’re new to the topic.

ZigBee is…

• An open standard for wireless device-to-device communication
• An alliance of over 200 companies who together are defining and using the standard to communicate in a variety of applications from smart energy to commercial building automation to marine safety.
• http://www.zigbee.org has additional information about the standard

The ZigBee Alliance specifies three major items of interest…

1. ZigBee networking – the basic levels of network interaction, including the acceptable RF behavior, methods of creating and joining the network, discovering routes and using routes to transmit traffic over the network.

2. ZigBee Application Profiles – these describe the messages and network settings for a particular “Application Profile” — all devices adhering to these settings may interoperate. Application Profiles may be published, public profiles approved by and distributed by the ZigBee Alliance, or they may be private profiles used by a single company or private groups of companies working together.

3. Certification – applications using ZigBee are certified by the Alliance to indicate to end users if the device(s) are compliant with one or more public application profiles. Applications using private profiles receive certification that they are using a properly operating ZigBee stack and will not adversely affect other ZigBee networks during operation.

As you view the guide, look for the following conventions:

• Note! will be used to call out items that require extra attention — particularly important or difficult concepts, or ideas that are often misunderstood

• Will be used to indicate functional areas that are only available to the ZigBee PRO feature set (available with EmberZNet PRO) or areas where functionality is different between ZigBee and ZigBee PRO.

• Ember! Will be used to identify features that are unique to the EmberZNet ZigBee implementation.

We will look at all of these items in detail throughout the course of this guide, so you may have questions – hopefully we will get to them!