IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee are currently buzzwords and have been standardized for
Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs). Although not specifically designed for supporting
large-scale ubiquitous and pervasive computing applications,
they show great potential for acting as federating communication technologies for Wireless Sensor Networks.
The open-ZB has been developed within the context of the
ART-WiSE (Architecture for Real-Time communications in Wireless Sensor networks)
research framework aiming at the specification of a scalable two-tiered communication
architecture for improving the timing and reliability behaviour of WSNs (Refer to the ART-WiSe
Framework website for more information). One of the major goals is relying as far as possible on existing
standard communication protocols and commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies - IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee for Tier 1
and IEEE 802.11 for Tier 2. The reason for using standard technologies pushed forward by commercial manufacturers is
that they can speed-up a wider utilization of WSNs.
The open-source implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee allows the testing,
implementation and validation of its mechanisms
along with our own proposals; therefore, we took the task
of implementing the protocols in TinyOS.
So far, there is no other implementation of the IEEE 802.15.4 and the ZigBee layers in TinyOS and we are pushing forward the collaboration
with the TinyOS Network Protocol Working Group
with the objective of providing a robust and reliable ZigBee compliant stack for TinyOS 2.0.
