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After Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, ZigBee is the one now making noises. Though ZigBee is used for data transfer on devices within a
personal or small area network, it is not being positioned as a threat to the existing technologies. It is targeted towards networked sensing, monitoring, and controlling applications rather than actual data transfer on Wi-Fi or file transfer over Bluetooth.

ZigBee is supposed to do what Wi-Fi or Bluetooth are not doing-two-way communication between multiple devices over simple networks using very less power and at very low cost. It uses the free 2.4 GHz band and the IEEE-defined 802.15.4 standard. And, unlike many wireless licensed technologies it is an open standard. ZigBee typically transfers a few bytes of sensor readings between devices, it requires very low bandwidth, and low power. In fact, the low power proposition gives it an edge over Bluetooth.

In December 2004, ZigBee 1.0 was accepted as an official standard and it is mandatory for companies to be member of the ZigBee Alliance for manufacturing Zigbee products. Today the alliance has over 100 members including Ember, Honeywell, Philips, Samsung, and Motorola who are working towards rolling out ZigBee devices.

The initial markets earmarked for ZigBee are: home control, building automation, and industrial automation. The underlying benefit is remote control of multiple systems and their flexible management. In the home and building segment this can be extended to lighting, heating, air conditioning, and security systems. In the industrial segment it can be used to improve asset management and extend existing manufacturing and process control systems reliably.

Once volumes pick up and acceptance of the technology increases, newer application like patient and fitness monitoring systems in hospitals will come up. On a larger scale, one could also expect environmental monitoring and energy management applications.

While we wait for ZigBee to make its commercial entry and prove its efficiency, big noises are being made about its deployment and the moolah it can bring in. Frost & Sullivan not only predicts $700 million in ZigBee chipset sale by 2008-up 3400 percent from the $18.8 million in 2004-but it also says there would be minimum of 100 to 150 ZigBee chips in every home in the world in the next two to three years.

According to another report by Industrial Wireless Sensor Networking, almost 85.9 million industrial wireless sensor network nodes would be deployed by 2010 with 85 percent of them being ZigBee nodes. West Technology Research Solutions says almost 19 million ZigBee chips would be shipped in 2006. ABI Research puts almost one million devices on ZigBee in 2005.

Though only time would check the veracity of these figures, the wireless technology certainly seems to be going on a hype crest. Not long ago Bluetooth was also projected to bring a revolution in data transfer within devices in the personal area network, but they have gained some acceptance only when applications over mobile phones were proven. ZigBee has to demonstrate its usefulness and usage efficiency, without which acceptance level might not be as high as predicted.

Anurag Prasad