Zigbee Range Explained

Zigbee is a wireless technology which works on a short range and low rate. It has a low cost and uses low power for the end devices. It supports mesh, tree and star network. It also has a global certification which assures interoperability.

For Zigbee, wireless sensor network is a very important application like most other wireless technologies which work on short range.

Short range wireless technologies

The designers which work on the wireless devices working in the short range between 900 MHZ to 2.4 GHz need to understand the parameters that affect the transmission range and how they can be used for calculating the range and the path loss for outdoor and indoor environments. As more and more industrial automation, building and home applications turn wireless, several short range devices are today receiving quite a lot of attention.

Normally, these applications make use of the standard base or proprietary approaches like Zigbee does in 900MHZ to 2.4 GHz bands. Since these devices are becoming more popular today, it is quite important for the designers to understand the complete range of the wireless communications.

Wireless range and Zigbee

Propagation environment and wireless channel are quite important when understanding the range estimations. The radio channels are the transmission path between the intended receiver and the transmitter. Unlike the wired channels which are normally predictable and stationary, the wireless channels are difficult to model, time variant and random.

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These models have focused traditionally on predicting the normal received signal strength from the transmitter at a given distance and the strength of the signal variability in close proximity to the location.

The propagation models which predict the signal strength for arbitrary transmitter receivers are normally very large scale propagation models which are quite useful for estimating the range of the transmitter.

The propagation models which have rapid fluctuations over the distances are normally small scale or are fading models. Zigbee is basically a specification for high level protocols for communications which use low power and small digital radios which are based on the 802.15.4 IEEE standard for the WPAN like wireless headphones which are connected to cell phones through short range radio. Any technology which is defined by Zigbee standards is less expensive and simpler than most other WPANs like Bluetooth.

Zigbee is targeted at the applications which require secure networking, long battery life and low data rate. It is very cost effective and uses low power and is a proprietary standard for mesh networking.

The low cost of the technology allows it to be used widely in monitoring and wireless control applications. Also, since the power used is very low, it allows a very long life of the batteries.

The mesh networking which is used allows high reliability and a very extensive range.