3. Review and outlook

In the light of the technical information just presented in this article, the reader should now have the basic knowledge and be able to appreciate the advantages and limitations of a wireless personal network like ZigBee.

The main aim of a ZigBee WPAN is to provide a simple, robust means of radio communication between electrical and electronic equipment that is generally small, often energy-independent, and with very occasional communication needs. The number of nodes in a ZigBee network can be very large, exceeding several thousand entities, as may be the case in an industrial, home automation or even military sensor network; however, the data rates envisaged are expressed in tens of kbits/s at most. A ZigBee node spends a large part of its time in a state of somnolence, communicating with its interlocutors on an ad hoc basis. It's the ability to wake up very quickly,...