Design and Implementation of a Zigbee-based Communication Substrate for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a large number of sensor nodes, which may not be produced by the same vendor. To enable communication among sensor nodes from different vendors, a standard communication link is needed. Zigbee has features such as low cost and low power consumption so that it has been considered as a promising candidate for the communication technology of WSN. In this paper, we describe the design issues and implementation details of the Zigbee network layer, which serves as a communication substrate for WSN. We also propose a beacon scheduling algorithm to avoid beacon collision, and a fast object-tracking technique that uses the functionality provided by Zigbee/IEEE 802.15.4 to track moveable sensor nodes. We have implemented the Zigbee network layer on the SCAN sensor board, which is developed by Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). The network layer is implemented as a Linux kernel module. The performance result shows that the throughput of the network layer can reach 88 Kbps, which is sufficient for most WSNs.