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ZigBee issued a press release today about this. They say the attack exploited a bug in one vendor's implementation of the protocol, not a weakness in the protocol itself.

Google has a vested interest in improving people's online experience.

I agree, but OnHub is much more than improving Internet connectivity. With OnHub, Google will control the network inside your home. Every dialogs between your devices. Especially as OnHub also includes 802.15.4 layer (on which ZigBee is already based, and on which Thread (created by Nest, owned by Google) is also built) that allows to to connect battery powered devices. Google will be able to much better understand how you live... for more targeted advertising (but this is also the door opened for more nefarious usages).

In thirty years they want to be the company running every home's electronics.

This is much more than that. With OnHub, Google will control the network inside your home. Every dialogs between your devices. Especially as OnHub also includes 802.15.4 layer (on which ZigBee is already based, and on which Thread (created by Nest, owned by Google) is also built) that allows to to connect battery powered devices.

>Also, your fridge, coffee-maker and the likes have absolutely zero need for all the bandwidth WIFI would bring
"640k ought to be enough for anybody"

But on a more serious note, we have a _GREAT_ standard for small low powered devices: ZigBee

Eh? If you want to use ZigBee in your wireless gizmo, you buy a ZigBee module just like you buy a Bluetooth module, and put it in.

If you want to sell ZigBee modules that you make yourself, your company joins the ZigBee Alliance for $3500/year, a trivial amount if you're paying yourself a salary (and if you're serious about compliance to the specification and using the ZigBee logo in your advertising).

If you want to sell someone else's ZigBee modules, you don't pay anything.

These are all similar to Bluetooth, except that the lowest membership grade in the Bluetooth SIG is $7500/year.

One of the most significant hindrances has been a reliable, well architectured, and economical means to retrofit a home in order to support the communications of the control protocols. We've had X-10 (control signaling over power lines) for decades, but it's reliability never matured. Insteon is a recent and significant improvement for powerline based control signalling, with larger address space, message relay, and acknowledgment, plus backwards compatibility to X10 (with some feature loss). The momentum with virtually all consumer electronics is toward wireless communication, and home automation is no exception. While there are several solid players already in the field (Z-wave, BCP?), they still involve proprietary protocols that are not designed to work products from other vendors.

Enter the Zigbee Alliance. http://www.zigbee.org/ who have developed a virtually complete standard (ratified by over two hundred product manufacturers, including Sony and Phillips) for five separate profiles (similar to, but more suited than bluetooth), one of which is Home Automation. The Zigbee alliance requires thorough testing of member products to ensure they meet the minimum standards for interoperability required by the target profile.

The two main wireless protocols in contention for use at the home level are 6LoWPAN ( http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/6lowpan-charter.html ) and ZigBee Pro ( http://www.zigbee.org/ ). ZigBee is the much more interesting network for this application

You can get cool OEM boards here, and a cool dev kit with 5 different modules here.

My answer: ZigBee! They're mesh topology, so you don't have to have line-of-sight to the coordinator. They have interoperability as part of the ZigBee spec by using defined profiles.

These specific devices are essentially rs-232 devices with some A/D and digital I/O lines. The end device incarnation can sleep most of the time and awake to take samples. You can run a 'sleepy' endpoint on batteries for 1 yr+. With a decent antenna, you can get pretty far on 1-2mW, and if you've got power available, they sell 100mW versions. I'm setting up monitoring using these beasts, and hope to use the same protocol for my home entertainment system.

My answer: ZigBee! They're mesh topology, so you don't have to have line-of-sight to the coordinator. They have interoperability as part of the ZigBee spec by using defined profiles.

These specific devices are essentially rs-232 devices with some A/D and digital I/O lines. The end device incarnation can sleep most of the time and awake to take samples. You can run a 'sleepy' endpoint on batteries for 1 yr+. With a decent antenna, you can get pretty far on 1-2mW, and if you've got power available, they sell 100mW versions. I'm setting up monitoring using these beasts, and hope to use the same protocol for my home entertainment system.

I've heard these ideas for years but, even after RTFA, and the 6Lowpan and ROLL references, I'm still trying to understand the advantage of these proposals over the existing technology (like ZigBee, among others). To be practical at all, the "Internet of Things" would have to be wireless, so there has to be an access point somewhere to the wired Internet. And because IP routing performs poorly in a multihop wireless network, the wireless network will have to use a different routing scheme, but still use the compressed IPv6 headers, while maintaining the low power features needed for battery-powered devices. The access point would have to handle both routing algorithms.

There would be no IP-related economies of scale in the networked devices, since they would need a new, start-from-scratch routing algorithm (e.g., ROLL).

So why is this superior over existing wireless protocols designed for this application? Is it just the gateway design? It doesn't seem like the gateway design of existing protocols would be significantly more complicated but, even if it were, it seems like would be repaid by the simplicity and size reduction in the many "small objects" in the network -- sort of an economic version of Amdahl's law. No?

Actually there is a very good competition. X10 was just first out of the gate. Try http://www.zigbee.org/en/index.asp

Sure hope their signal is encrypted these days. I remember years ago, hearing that all a would-be burglar had to do was eavesdrop on the security camera and get their own complete view of your house because the signal wasn't encrypted. X-10 was the brand mentioned. I would have thought they would be the laughing stock of the industry and go out of business, but apparently they're still selling their cheap crap security cameras, huh? Even better, people are recommending them on /.

Funny stuff.

Actually there is a very good competition. X10 was just first out of the gate. Try http://www.zigbee.org/en/index.asp

Apparently, I have more time to type a response? No, they were not forced, and the processor probably is an ARM processor or similar. This particular manufacturer makes some cool toys, I have one of their systems installed. Zigbee is definitely better than X10, and you should see it in more appliances soon.

Imagine your next new house, where the light switches are electronic remotes for the actual switch in the light fixture. Now imagine you can move it anywhere, stick it to the wall where ever you want. Perhaps you want that single switch by the front door to ensure that ALL lights are turned off when you leave for the day? Zigbee or others will help make that a reality.

I can see a day not long from now when you can get online and see your home in 3D (not unlike secondlife et al) and see all the things that work remotely. Lights that are on etc.

A billion little data points a month is peanuts, but can give us so much data. Think of water flow sensors on each shower/toilet/sink etc. Once the sensor devices drop below 19.99/ea you can put them anywhere/everywhere. The electric company and water/gas companies are not the only people that want to know how much I use. I also want to know where/why.

Sounds like open standard *Zigbee* http://zigbee.org/ networks. Been hearing about Ember http://ember.com/ chipsets and self-healing, self-discovery wireless mesh networks for a few years now. Pretty quiet as of late.

Wibree isn't the only contender for use in wireless sensors, however. Zigbee is an ongoing standardization project and has similar characteristics to Wibree.

At first is sounded like this could compete with Zigbee http://www.zigbee.org/en/index.asp or Z-Wave http://www.z-wavealliance.org/content/modules/Star t/ technologies. Then again, what is this good for? The battery is...wait, no battery. Power comes from the device that reads/writes this grain-of-rice sized wireless/memory device...

ZigBee isn't new, V1 of the standard was released in 2004. I investigated using it for a project a year ago.

Here's the ZigBee Aliance faq.

For example, here's a company that seems to be furthering the ZigBee movement along the Zigbee (and Slashdot?) ideals: "a GNU open source development tool chain allow rapid porting of your C or C++ code to AMD's Au1000 processor". I'm surprised they used AMD and not a Transmeta processor, however, which is even more power-efficient, because that's supposedly one of the best things about Zigbee: you can have a tiny little Zigbee chip for which you only have to change the battery once a year or so.

Check out Zigbee, it has some support for encryption in the protocol stack. http://www.zigbee.org/ has some info that may be of use. Zigbee is a "reliable, secure, low power wireless communications protocol based on IEEE 802.15.4" --buddy

I found a lot of this out last year when Zigbee first caught my attention. I saw an article in Scientific American where the US Army is experimenting with distributing small RF-linked sound sensors to pinpoint the source of a gunshot in an urban environment. The timing of the report was all that was needed to locate the sniper in about two seconds. I believe they were using Zigbee.

Most of what I posted above was just from documents I've seen on their website, nothing more.

Interesting information, many thanks.

But it seems like it might not be ready for prime time. Their products page is "Coming Soon" and nothing more.

Who are the leading manufacturers of devices for this technology? I'd really like to check it out.

D

Check out their FAQ at http://zigbee.org/en/about/faq.asp#7

Zigbee products won't be available for another few months. The Alliance (http://www.zigbee.org/ just released the 1.0 spec and the software guys like Figure8Wireless (http://www.f8w.com/) won't be finished with the 1.0 stack until the end of this quarter, at the soonest.

Evidently not.

...your product page has actual products, and doesn't say "Coming Soon".

wait for the zigbee stuff. Works with your existing G band wireless, no powerline issues, global standards. Should be way cool.

Zigbee adds some really cool stuff, including mesh networking, dynamic mesh creation and maintenance, security, and a very cool application profile tool.

Who says that you need to get certified? Maybe you do if you want to advertise your product as "zigbee compatible" or whatever, but if you don't care then there's no reason to test. We're using the zigbee stuff from Chipcon and we aren't a member of the Zigbee Alliance. Oh, BTW, it costs $9500 to become a member of the Alliance, not $7500.

It's a standard, alright. Whether it gets into widespread use is another question (anyone remember OSI?) and that depends on having products quickly.

I know you are telling a joke, but I'm not sure whether it is more humorous or innacurate.

I suggest reading a nice summary over at MIT Technology Review.

But since you obviously don't read the articles, let me cover it for you:
- Zigbee is power efficient. A ZigBee switch should be able to run off watch batteries for years. Bluetooth - HA!
- Zigbee stack is a small 28k. Bluetooth's stack is 250k.
- Zigbee networks can support up to 255 nodes, and can be switched to 16 bit addressing to support 65,000 nodes. Bluetooth can have 8 active nodes, 255 total.
- Zigbee range is around 30 meters. Bluetooth is 10 meters.
- Zigbee supports three network topologies (star, mesh, cluster tree). Bluetooth supports a dynamic piconet topology.
- Zigbee enabled devices can be built cheaply. Bluetooth was *supposed* to be cheap. This is due to the short stack.

And the list goes on. See the ZigBee FAQ.

Zigbee is designed for a very specific application (switching, censors, controllers, etc.). And by this list, you can see that it was specifically designed to meet the needs of that application. Bluetooth does not and cannot support that application, just like Zigbee cannot support the application Bluetooth was designed for (cable replacement).

Though whats with the name? It's quite unusual and far from catchy. Ity's funny because my dad's name is Zbigniew and for short he goes by "Zbig" and people *still* mangle it and one othe common things he gets is "Zigbee"

Though whats with the name? It's quite unusual and far from catchy. Ity's funny because my dad's name is Zbigniew and for short he goes by "Zbig" and people *still* mangle it and one othe common things he gets is "Zigbee"

Move over Bluetooth, behold the era of Zigbee!

Yeah - and I would have thought that ZigBee would be a more appropriate wireless protocol to use as well.

Standardized AES encryption.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that the article had a typo - they probably meant IEEE 802.15.4 (aka Zigbee), not 802.16.4. The Zigbee FAQ has a lot of valuable information about it.

Standardized AES encryption.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that the article had a typo - they probably meant IEEE 802.15.4 (aka Zigbee), not 802.16.4. The Zigbee FAQ has a lot of valuable information about it.

Standardized AES encryption.

BTW, I'm pretty sure that the article had a typo - they probably meant IEEE 802.15.4 (aka Zigbee), not 802.16.4. The Zigbee FAQ has a lot of valuable information about it.

DailyWireless has more on Wearable Communicating Costumes and the Adidas Hot Shoe.

"Smart clothing" and wearable computing developers include:

• France Telecom invented a flexible fiber optic system that can be embedded in clothes. Static or animated graphics can be displayed.

• Chipmaker Infineon has created a packaging technology that allows circuitry to be woven into ordinary fabrics, which can then be normally washed or even dry-cleaned. The company created a prototype jacket with an embedded MP3 player.

• Orang-Otang Computers has patented designs for gadgets like a phone that fits under a shirt sleeve, a wrist-mounted audio recorder, a wearable laptop and a wearable camera.

• California's Charmed Technology, an MIT Media Lab spin-off, is poised to be a world leader in affordable, wearable Internet products. Their CharmBadge is designed for aiding the communication and networking.

• Fossil, best known for trendy watches, has created wrist devices that exchange information with handheld computers and Microsoft's Spot.

• The Smart Shirt System uses biological sensors to monitor heart rates or the locations of those wearing the technology, says Jeffrey Wolf, CEO of Sensatex Inc.

• Tactex Controls uses "smart fabric" for a touch-sensitive MIDI controller.

• Zigbee-equipped sneakers might record speed, body telemetry and even external sensors.

• Orientation, communications and geographic positioning electronics can all be incorporated into outdoor clothing. Heat can be transferred through conducting fibres to colder areas of the body

• The SCOTTeVEST shows the way traditional garments may be altered to meet the demanding needs of spies and undercover agents.

Exactly right. Security, in wireless sensor networks, means more than just encryption (for privacy), however. In many applications it's more important to have message integrity and sender authentication, meaning that the recipient is guaranteed that the message hasn't been altered, and that it was from who it says it was from. For example, having an encrypted message from a short-range wireless light switch is often of little utility; people around can see the light come on (perhaps through a window), so you're not really protecting anything. However, as the parent poster says, you really don't want some car of script kiddies driving through your neighborhood randomly turning lights on and off at 2 AM. The wireless lights need to know that the messages they receive are from their associated switches, not from some 3l33t d00dz; that's the function of message integrity and source authentication checking.

Recognizing the importance of these types of security, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, available here, employs the Advanced Encryption Standard for encryption, message integrity, and sender authentication. The ZigBee Alliance specifies key transport protocols, key management, and other higher layer security functions.

Wireless sensor networks are not new; there is even a textbook published recently on them (Wireless Sensor Networks: Architectures and Protocols). Many corporations have active WSN programs, including:

Motorola

Ember and

Figure 8 Wireless.

University research programs, in addition to Berkeley, include:

UCLA WINS

MIT uAMPS

plus those sposored by DARPA.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard, available here, was designed to support such networks. The ZigBee Alliance, an industrial consortium of over 60 companies, is the marketing and compliance arm of the 802.15.4 standard, as the Wi-Fi Alliance is to 802.11. The vitality of the ZigBee Alliance, which had over 350 attendees at its recent open house in Silicon Valley, is an indication that this technology is moving from research into commercialization; the commercialization of wireless sensor networks is the real significance of the Wired article.

Floppy drives still exist because there is no really cheap replacement for them. IR eclipsed only because Bluetooth was pushed in the market, and it does the same thing better at ~ the same price. I call that zombie-techs: Technologies that are dead, but they don't know it until another technology tells them. Bluetooth is the latest zombie-tech.

I think that in the end Bluetooth will be replaced by Zigbee for low-end devices and wifi for high-end.

ZigBee-compliant products operate in the unlicensed bands worldwide, including 2.4GHz (global), 915Mhz (Americas) and 868Mhz (Europe). Raw data throughput rates of 250Kbs can be achieved at 2.4GHz (10 channels), 40Kbs at 915Mhz (6 channels) and 20Kbs at 868Mhz (1 channel). Transmission distance is expected to range from 10 to 75 meters, depending on power output and environmental characteristics.

Actually that's not entirely true. The 802.15.4 standard defines the physical radio behavior of the personal area network; ZigBee is the logical network and application software that runs on top of 802.15.

Ref: ZigBee FAQ

Speaking of IP addresses for wireless headphones, has anyone heard anything on the progress of ZigBee? ZigBee (IEEE 802.15.4) was supposed to be the low-cost/low-power/low-bit-rate Bluetooth clone which was supposed to cost ~$0.50-$1.00.

I found the article's comment about the need for the NSF to motivate standards in wireless sensor networks to be strange, since the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is due to be published any day now (the final draft is alread for sale at the IEEE online store). The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed for low cost, very low power consumption wireless sensor networks; it has a raw over-the-air data rate of 250 kb/s, operates in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, and can support peer-to-peer multihop (so-called "mesh") networks with device duty cycles below 3 ppm.

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is being used by the ZigBee Alliance, an organization of more than 50 large and small companies, to establish networking and application profile interoperability standards, much like Wi-fi has done with IEEE 802.11. The ZigBee Alliance will have a session open to the public at its next meeting, in Berlin June 3.

The IEEE 1451.5 wireless sensor standard, which will standardize sensor discovery and data formatting, is at an earlier stage of development; proposals are now being presented.

With all this activity, it's not clear to me just what the NSF is expecting to standardize.

There are many other research programs, both academic and industrial, on wireless ad hoc networks, going back at least to the 1978 DARPA-sponsored Distributed Sensor Nets Workshop at Carnegie-Mellon University. Most of the work has been funded by DARPA, by the low-power wireless integrated microsensors (LWIM) project of the mid-1990s and now by the SensIT project. (Their projects page lists more than 25 academic research programs on these networks, complete with links.)

The University of California at Los Angeles, often working in collaboration with the Rockwell Science Center, has had a Wireless Integrated Network Sensors (WINS) project since 1993. UCLA also supports the similar-but-different "Smart Dust" program, which also employs ultra-low-power networking, but uses optical communication between network nodes.

Professor Anantha Chandrakasan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the Principal Investigator of the uAMPS (microAMPS) project.

On the commercial side, these networks are being developed by Ember, graviton, Wherenet, and Motorola, just to name a few.

The ZigBee industry consortium is the marketing and compliance arm of the IEEE 802.15.4 draft standard, in a relationship similar to that between WECA (with the "Wi-Fi" brand) and IEEE 802.11b. This draft standard for ultra-low-power, ultra-low-cost wireless networking, now under development, should be finished this winter.