Mainstream wireless personal area networking capable consumer electronic products (excluding Infra-red (IR)) began to appear in the late 1990s and during the early 2000s the market witnessed the emergence of the first Wi-Fi and Bluetooth products. The ability to use products wirelessly was a completely new experience, as IR products required devices to be in line-of-sight. The TV remote control, of course, is the classic example of an IR device still commonly used today, although ZigBee, Bluetooth wireless technology, and a few others are looking to evolve this classic 40+ year old product. Nevertheless, the Motorola Xoom 2 (motorola.com) included IR capability to offer a universal remote, which can control multiple IR capable devices through a dedicated App, such as Dijit (dijit.com), a universal remote control application for smartphones and tablets. Another similarly classic wireless technology is the key-fob for vehicular access – it remains popular and doesn't require a line-of-sight operation. Some early wireless products that utilized Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were perhaps a cumbersome introduction to the wireless era, as many consumers grappled with early versions of these wireless-enabled products. The growth and development of these wireless devices as they have evolved has been exponential. The last decade or so has afforded consumers the ability to acclimatize to and increasingly become familiar with a range of wireless-enabled products and their associated idiosyncrasies, ensuring their future success. To demonstrate consumers’ over-familiarity with wireless technology, Wi-Fi has become synonymous with the ability to connect to the Internet; in fact, some consumers incorrectly regard Wi-Fi as the Internet.

The low power, wireless sensor technology portfolio would not be complete without the inclusion of EnOcean's award-winning patented batteryless, wireless sensor radio technology. In this chapter, we discuss EnOcean's inception and moderately short history, and we provide a review of the Alliance and promoter members’ benefits. EnOcean uses a patented technique to self-power its wireless sensors, and we'll delve deeper into the company's innovative technology and how the technology is being used within the commercial sector later on in the chapter. Likewise, we'll explore EnOcean's product portfolio, the market scope, and numerous user scenarios that place the technology into the real world, ultimately to gain a better understanding of its application-base and purpose. Similarly, we'll look at how EnOcean compares with other low power wireless sensor technologies and review some key differentiators that set EnOcean apart from its competitors.

Overview

Briefly, EnOcean's innovative technology prides itself on a technique known as energy harvesting – the ability of a sensor to derive energy from its environment to power its sensor technology, as opposed to using batteries or any other fixed power source. The technology, or indeed the notion, isn't new; you may recall from Chapter 5, “Introducing Low Power and Wireless Sensor Technologies,” that we discussed numerous techniques used to source energy from natural resources. Renewable energy describes the conversion of natural resources, such as the wind, sunlight, rain, and so on, into a sustainable energy form which can be used to self-power a device. The energy harvesting technique used by EnOcean detects minor variations in the environment, such as change in temperature, ambient light, and the turning on and off of a switch, whereby such differences are sufficient to be converted to enable an EnOcean sensor to accumulate and store energy.

ZigBee (zigbee.org) is a protocol-based global standard, which has been developed by a consortium of over 400 companies around the world. The protocol relies on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 standard, which provides the protocol with its air-interface. ZigBee has been around for a number of years, with its initial ratified standard appearing in December 2004; later, in June 2005, the standard was made public. ZigBee specifies a software protocol that sits upon the IEEE 802.15.4 Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical (PHY) layers, which we'll discuss later on.

In this chapter, we discuss ZigBee's inception and evolution since making its first public appearance in 2005. What's more, we'll explore the ZigBee Alliance, along with its membership benefits and structure. The chapter also discusses the diverse market scope that ZigBee has already captured and is currently targeting, and explores the ZigBee product range and potential. Naturally, we'll also look at how ZigBee is set apart from other competing technologies within the same market sector. Finally, the chapter lifts the lid on ZigBee and takes a closer look at its software architecture and protocol.