ZigBee vs ZigBee-Pro
David Gascón - November 18, 2008

Let's see what are the main differences between the ZigBee-2006v and the 2007 new release called ZigBee-PRO.

  • Stochastic addressing: In the first ZigBee implementation the address was chosen by the Coordinator regarding the node position in the network tree. Now the 16b network address is choosen randomly. If the nodes choose the same address ir is solved using the 64b IEEE 802.15.4 MAC address.
    zigbee
  • Mesh data management: in the previous implementation each node had to keep a table of any of the routes from and to the gateway to any device (if it was in the routing path), now the nodes just save the way to get to the gateway (reducing the memory space needed). The gateway (a node supposed to have higher RAM resources) stores the path (with all the hops) to any of the nodes. When the gateway has to send a packet to a specific node it appends the information about the hops which has to be taken in the same packet. This method is called "many to one".
  • Fragmentation: large data packages can be easily fragmented.
  • Dynamic best channel choice: the nodes will move to another channel if the current one has interferences or noise (energy over a specific threshold).
  • Asymmetric connections: the links among the nodes are not always symmetric and the quality of the connection is different from node A to B than from node B to A, this is due to several reasons like the load of the node the interferences, the noise... for this reason the PRO version tries to take this issue into account and to make the best possible paths.
    ember
  • Security: The 2006 ZigBee implementation used up to AES 128b and a global network key to create secure communications. The new version has a more complex system which let each couple of nodes to have their own key so that p2p encryption can be performed. A peer to peer link encryption layer is added.

There are some ZigBee modules in the market which support the ZigBee-Pro 2007v release, one of them is the XBee ZB module which uses the Ember's ZigBee chipset. This module is integrated in motes such as Waspmote.

 

 

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