What is ZigBee? The name refers to the waggle dance of honey bees after their return to the beehive.
ZigBee is an open global standard for wireless technology invented to use energy-saving digital radio signals for personal area networks (PAN). It was created in 1998, standardized in 2003, and revised in 2006.
It also designed to be simpler and reasonable price than other personal network technologies. ZigBee performs on the IEEE 802.15.4 specification as a based and use to design networks that need a low data transfer rate, energy effectiveness and secure networking.
Nowadays, most of us using smart home technology or smart devices in our daily life. These devices have good chance it operates on Zigbee, a wireless communications protocol. It’s also becoming the normal standard wireless protocol that smart devices use to connect with others. Compared to Wi-Fi, it uses less power and it designed to uphold hundreds of devices on a network and suitable across larger homes.
The interesting part is Zigbee uses different kind of network called mesh network. Each device can connect through another device, with that device relaying packets of data back and forth between the two. As far as the other devices stay in the range, it still can connect to each other even if placed very far away.
Even if one device break or powered down, it shouldn’t be a problem, as other nearby devices should fill in the missing link. This can be done because Zigbee use 128-bit cryptographic keys that the system based on symmetric keys. That means both the recipient and originator of a transaction need to share the same key.
With Zigbee also, you can use a very wide range of devices from other manufacturers without needing a specific hub. Some devices that run the same 2.4GHz wireless band can cause a problem.
Feel free to contact E-SPIN for your Zigbee troubleshooting, as E-SPIN carry range of product in specific for wireless network performance application analysis, that include cover the Zigbee use case and context for whether your new Zigbee support device testing.
