ZigBee ADVANTAGES

ZigBee is so low powered that a typical battery-powered node can wake up, check in, send data, and shut down in less than 30 ms. This leads to an extremely long battery life. For devices with a 30-s check-in period or more, the battery’s shelf life will expire before the battery capacity runs out.

If a node is configured for use with a beacon frame and a guaranteed time slot, then on-air time is reduced to 3 ms. This can all be achieved with only one transceiver IC incorporating the PHY and some MAC layer functions and a light-weight task running on the same medium-powered 8-bit microcontroller used for the application. The flash memory requirement for a ZigBee device ranges from 16 to 60 KB depending on the device’s complexity, the required stack features, and whether or not it’s an RFD or FFD. This is about a quarter of Bluetooth’s requirements.

AES 128-bit security and a sophisticated MAC layer supporting CSMA-CA, clear channel assessment, link quality indication, optional acknowledgement, and packet freshness are built in. An addressing scheme can support more than 64,000 nodes per coordinator. Multiple network coordinators can be linked, which means extremely large networks are possible.