ZigBee Alliance Ratifies 3.0 Standard, Announces Collaboration With EnOcean Alliance

December 17, 2015 |Industry Notes

The ZigBee Alliance ratified ZigBee 3.0, opening the door to improved communication and interoperability among products in connected homes, intelligent buildings and smart cities, it said Wednesday. Following a year of testing and development, ZigBee 3.0 extends from the physical to the application layer, and includes certification and branding “for improved interoperability across a growing range of market segments,” said the nonprofit alliance. It's compatible with existing ZigBee Home Automation and ZigBee Light Link standards, and “unifies all previous application-specific ZigBee device descriptions, behaviors and profiles into a common applications layer” that supports IoT product development for smart homes, buildings and neighborhood area networks, it said. The ZigBee Alliance also said it's collaborating with EnOcean Alliance to develop an open, global specification for energy-harvesting wireless communication technology for interoperable, self-powered IoT sensors. The effort will bring together EnOcean equipment profiles (EEPs) for sub-GHz networking with ZigBee 3.0 in the worldwide 2.4 GHz frequency band, called “the key to the consumer market,” by EnOcean Alliance Chairman Graham Martin. Defining technical specs for worldwide wireless energy harvesting gives members of both alliances access to new regions and applications, Martin said. The joint effort will bring energy-harvesting wireless communication to more applications in the IoT and consumer arenas, said the alliances. ZigBee 3.0 enables battery-free devices to securely join networks across various energy harvesting applications, they said. The collaboration will provide a foundation to bring data to IoT frameworks of other industry initiatives and facilitate interoperable communication from the sensor to the cloud, they said. The alliances will create a technical task force to define specs required to combine EEPs with ZigBee 3.0, which operates in the IEEE 802.15.4 2.4 GHz standard.