2. Protocols based on 802.15.4

Several working groups such as the Wireless Industrial Networking Alliance (WINA), the ZigBee Alliance, WirelessHART (HART Communication Foundation, HCF) and ISA100 have attempted to define and establish industry standards for wireless technologies in different application areas. Currently, only ZigBee has commercial products actually available. This alliance was formed at the end of 2004. In contrast, the WirelessHART specifications were only published in August 2007. All these specifications are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which provides a solid foundation for building mesh and ad-hoc networks.

Depending on the type of application required, different variants of protocol layers higher than 802.15.4 have been developed, and are presented in the remainder of this article.