1. General presentation

1.1 The ZigBee project

The initial idea for the ZigBee project dates back to 1998; a first proposal (v0.1) was presented during 2000, followed rapidly by a second (v0.2) at the end of the same year. After submission to the IEEE in mid-2001, the ZigBee Alliance [13] was created to develop and promote the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which was ratified in May 2003. The production of compatible modules was then planned, and the first products (radio chips, protocol stacks, embedded modules, development kits, etc.) appeared; they have been available since early 2005.

The ZigBee protocol is based on this IEEE 802.15.4 standard [9] [2] for the physical and link layers (see ), which are layers 1 and 2 of the OSI model, and on the development of the network...