What is Zig Bee Wireless Technology? - Uses of Zigbee Technology

A type of low cost, low power and wireless technology which is used for the different purposes at ultra low power is known as Zig bee technology. Low power radios on the basis of standard personal wireless networking are used by a protocol to enhance the technology. It offers excellent wireless control path network. It was not proposed or designed for the excellent or high speed data transfer rate applications. But it was designed for working on excellent long battery timings at low cost and also at ultra low power consumption. It is an ideal technology which operates at low power and low cost and used for wireless monitoring and control.

Characteristics Features of Zig Bee Technology:

There are different features of Zig bee technology on the basis of which we can understand characteristics of Zig bee technology. The focus of network appliances under the standard communication protocol describes the features of technology on the basis of nodes per network. Some important features are as follows:

1.      It is a type of technology which requires ultra low power consumption with an excellent battery life ranging from moths two years. As we know that there is no. of appliances in the present era which are remote control and often these devices need large number of batteries to be provisioned. These kind of batteries which has low battery timing required large expenditures to recur them timely. Long battery life of Zig bee standard can be achievable by two different means i.e. Continuous Network connection: these connections are slow but they drain the battery surely.

2.      Second is intermittent connection: these are slower than the previous one but they can also drain the battery.

3.      In this technology maximum data rates allowed for different frequency bands but in some cases these bands are fixed.

4.      High throughput and low latency for low duty cycle applications that are nearly to 0.1%.

5.      Zig bee technology used Carrier Sense Multiple for channel access and also avoids the collision during access.

6.      Addressing of number of networks with the help of address devices up to 64 bit.

Network Devices of Zig Bee Technology:

There are three main devices of this technology which are used in networking

• Zig bee Coordinator.
• Zig bee Router.
• Zig bee End device.

Zig bee Coordinator:

The very important device of Zig bee technology is the Zig bee coordinator which is required to form the base or ground of the network tree and also built links to other networks. There is only one coordinator in the case of one network. This device is able to store the information about the network and it is responsible for security keys. It is denoted by (ZC).

Zig bee Router:

The second device of Zig bee technology is Zig bee router which acts as an in between device executing the application function and also useful for delivering the data from one to another system. It is denoted by (ZR).

Zig bee End Device:

It is a part of Zig bee which contains enough functions to talk to the parent node as compared to the coordinator and the router. It is unable to relay the data from other devices. This relationship allows the node a significant amount of time for asleep, for that reason the battery of Zig bee device is long as compared to other remote devices. It is denoted by (ZED) and it can be less expensive to manufacture ZED as compared to ZR or ZC.  

Uses of Zig Bee Technology:

• Smart lighting and advanced temperature control.
• Power sensors and Fire detector.
• Environmental and Energy management.
• Energy monitoring.
• Mobile monitoring and security.