In recent years the evolution of self-organizing and self-healing peer-to-peer mesh networks based on such devices, which can communicate directly with each other without needing to bypass a central server, has spurred growth of wireless technologies such as ZigBee, and the market for ZigBee-based products is expected to increase to 200 million units by 2010, and 500 million units by 2015. The ZigBee PRO Feature Set offers, compared to the ZigBee Feature Set, flexible and various management options of network routing, address management, multicast and group addressing, link quality management, and fragmentation of large data. It eases efforts to manage larger and more stable networks.

Smart Energy administration using the secure and reliable low-power wireless network With ZigBee PRO where low consumption and low cost devices can be run on AA batteries for years, users can construct secure networks with complex functionalities like Fragmentation which allows electronic certificates and images to be sent, and Frequency Agility which can detect the level of interference in the frequency band and if necessary move the network to a less congested frequency. As energy consumption has become an important issue in recent years, Smart Energy systems (central administration systems for monitoring electricity consumption) are being tested in California in the USA, and ZigBee PRO has become a necessary requirement for such systems.

*Main functionalities in ZigBee PRO
1.Frequency Agility:
Since the 2.4 GHz frequency band used in ZigBee is shared with Wireless LAN and Bluetooth, there is possibility of interference. Using the Frequency Agility functionality, the transmission status is being constantly monitored, and if heavy interference is detected, the coordinator shall issue a command to make the network use another frequency channel which is less noisy. This makes communication more efficient and the network more stable.

2.Fragmentation:
A maximum of 127 bytes of data can be sent in a single packet in ZigBee, but for some application purpose this limit may be regarded as too small. In ZigBee PRO, data larger than 127 bytes are automatically fragmented and sent, with the recipient being able to reassemble the data fragments to form the original data again. With this Fragmentation functionality, more complex applications like image transmission, electronic certificate transmission or a high level of network security can be achieved.

3.Stochastic Addressing:
The address of a device assigned by its parent used not to be easily changed afterwards. With the Stochastic Addressing functionality in ZigBee PRO, connectivity is preserved when devices are moved and it is useful for devices like displays.

4.Address Conflict Resolution:
Though there are as many as 65565 addresses (16-bit address space) assignable in a ZigBee network, in case of an address conflict, there has been no mechanism to resolve it. In ZigBee PRO, address conflict can be detected and the device can change its own address such that it is different from the other devices in the network.

5.Source Routing:
In the previous ZigBee specification, while data routing has been automatically carried out during data transmission, it has not been possible to collect information on the route used for the transmission of a data packet. With the Source Routing functionality in ZigBee PRO, routes being used can now be known.

6.Many-to-one
In the previous ZigBee specification, routing needed to be constructed for each and every device. If there are many devices in the network, the load on the network can be large. For example, in a network with 6 devices connected to a coordinator, route discovery needs to be performed 6 times. Using the Many-to-one functionality in ZigBee PRO, route discovery communication needs to be carried out only once to complete the process of finding routes for all devices.

7.Link Status:
The same route has been used for inbound and outbound transmissions in the past, but sometimes connection can be good in one direction but bad in the opposite direction. With the Link Status functionality in ZigBee PRO, inbound and outbound routes with the best wireless connection would be used separately.

About our ZigBee PRO products, Software stack "SK STACK PRO" and "ZigBee PRO SDK",

Go to SDK information page(link） or

Catalog download (PDF P1.P2) or please contact us at sales@skyley.com.