ZigBee Technology

hi this Zigbee is a new technology and some one didnt hear about this.please go through this article. u will gain some useful information

The low rate (LR) wireless personal access network (WPAN) (IEEE 802.15.4/LRWPAN)
is intended to serve a set of industrial, residential, and medical applications
with very low power consumption, low cost requirement, and relaxed needs
for data rate and QoS .The low data rate enables the LR-WPAN to consume
little power.
ZigBee technology is a low data rate, low power consumption, low cost, wireless
networking protocol targeted toward automation and remote control applications.
The IEEE 802.15.4 committee and ZigBee Alliance worked together and
developed the technology commercially known as ZigBee. It is expected to provide
low-cost and low-power connectivity for devices that need battery life as long as
several months to several years but does not require data transfer rates as high as
those enabled by Bluetooth. ZigBee can be implemented in mesh (peer- to-peer)
networks larger than is possible with Bluetooth. ZigBee-compliant wireless devices
are expected to transmit 10–75 minutes, depending on the RF environment and
power output consumption required for a given application, and operate in the
unlicensed RF worldwide (2.4 GHz global, 915 MHz America, or 868 MHz Europe)
bands. The data rate is 250 kbps at 2.4 GHz, 40 kbps at 915 MHz, and 20 kbps at
868 MHz.
The IEEE 802.15.4 committee is focusing on the specifi cations of the lower
two layers of the protocol (the physical and data link layers). On the other hand, ZigBee Alliance aims to provide the upper layers of the protocol stack (from the
network to the application layer) for interoperable data interworking, security
services, and a range of wireless home and building control solutions. ZigBee Alliance
provides interoperability compliance testing, marketing of the standard, and
advanced product engineering for the evolution of the standard. This will assure
consumers to buy products from different manufacturers with confi dence that
those products will work together.
ZigBee often uses a basic master-slave confi guration suited to static star networks
of many infrequently used devices that talk via small data packets. It allows
up to 254 nodes. Other network topologies such as peer-to-peer and cluster tree
are also used. When ZigBee node is powered down, it can wake up and get a
packet in around 15 msec.