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M. Ramesh

Saying Howdy with Zigbee! That's the new technology to make your machines at home communicate with each other.

IN about a year from now, many domestic appliances that you buy, such as refrigerators, DVD players or washing machines, may carry a small label saying `ZigBee-compliant'. The IT world abounds in such fanciful and confounding jargon, but all the same, it is fun to learn what they mean.

In future, machines will communicate with each other. We have already heard innumerable examples: The refrigerator will tell the computer what is to be ordered from the grocer, the computer will tell the phone to ring him up and the answering machine will place the order. Or, the mobile phone will open the garage door or switch on a light. Or, a little computer in the kitchen of a restaurant knows what orders are being placed at the tables, just as the waiter is taking down the orders on his personal digital assistant (PDA). Or, a metre-reader in a passing van will pick up details of electricity consumption from all the houses down the road, as it drives past them.

But for the machines to communicate with each other, they should be made compatible. Or, simply put, the signals from one machine should be recognisable by the other. There should, in other words, be a protocol agreed among the manufacturers, to make the inter-appliance communication possible.

The newest protocol (or, set of standards) in the market is called `ZigBee'. It is a wireless communication protocol, something like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, but with significant differences compared to both (see table). The ZigBee protocol is expected to be formed and publicised sometime around August.

ZigBee is being evolved by a group of companies, called the ZigBee Alliance. The Alliance describes itself as "an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked monitoring and control products based on an open global standard." It was promoted by six companies, Honeywell, Invensys, Mitsubishi Electric, Motorola, Philips and Samsung. Today, it has over 70 members, 27 of them joined the Alliance only on May 11.

ZigBee addresses one segment of wireless applications, called WPAN, short for Wireless Personal Area Network. It is a segment technically defined as `short distance, low data rate' — up to 100 metres, 240 kbps. This is about the distance and speed demanded by the applications that ZigBee intends to address — lighting controls, automatic metre reading, home security, medical sensing and monitoring, blind, drapery and shade controls and so on. This differs from Wi-Fi, which is basically wireless Internet, where the `hot spot' is a much larger area and the data transfer is at a higher rate. According to a study, the size of the market of appliances that will be produced under ZigBee protocol will be a little over $8 billion by the year 2008. The study, conducted by West Technology Research Solutions LLC, said it will not be unusual to find some 100 ZigBee chips in a house in the `not too distant future.'

WPAN needs were sought to be met through the Bluetooth protocol, which was similarly evolved out of consortium efforts. Bluetooth had a number of problems and is said to be fading out of the market; ZigBee in a way is an improvement over Bluetooth. "Bluetooth (-enabled products) are expensive, slow, bulky and power hungry," says Srini Krishnamurthy, Vice-President, Business Development, Airbee Solutions, a ZigBee consortium member that develops software for ZigBee applications. If a Bluetooth device uses the same 3-volt battery that a ZigBee contrivance does, the battery will run out in one hour, observes Krishnamurthy.

Critically, ZigBee devices can be configured in many ways. For example, it can be `one to one' or `one to many' connectivity, or a network. In the case of a network, some 65,000 devices can be linked up — in contrast, in the case of Bluetooth, only eight can. So, that is Zigbee for you.

mail to: ramesh@thehindu.co.in

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