Review and outlook
Technologie ZigBee / 802.15.4

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,...