4. Balance sheet

As described in this article, the emergence of ZigBee has led to the realization of numerous applications, and has opened the door to promising new potential. The often specific needs of these applications have prompted researchers and manufacturers to propose numerous amendments to the initial standard, as well as a number of variants, many of them proprietary. What all the proposed versions have in common is the single physical layer, specified in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which remains the major asset of all these technologies, as the production cost of the transceivers, of which there are few on the market, remains very low.

ZigBee covers all application areas, from data collection from sensors to the transmission of commands for actuators. As a result, the volume of data per node is very limited (just a few bytes) and must remain so, otherwise the network...