ZigBee announces IP adoption
Last week the ZigBee Alliance made a ground-breaking announcement -
ZigBee Alliance Plans Further Integration of Internet Protocol Standards
What this means in practice is that future versions of ZigBee specifications will incorporate IETF 6LoWPAN and ROLL IPv6 standards. In practice the most straight-forward way to achieve this is by adapting the ZigBee Application Layer (ZAL) over UDP, as specified in http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-tolle-cap-00.txt.
I am very excited about this – and believe this is a win-win for the whole industry. This lets the ZigBee Alliance, IPSO, the IETF and the IEEE (802.15.4) work in the same direction with much greater impact on achieving the Internet of Things. My own bet was that we would see ZigBee/IP in 2010 – great that it came a year early!
According to the press release and what I have seen happening in the industry – ZigBee has received a lot of pressure from the energy industry and chip makers to take advantage of native IP technology. This recent ZigBee alliance with Homeplug surely helped the decision as well. Texas Instruments was the first chip maker to make a press release with their strong support of ZigBee’s announcement, here at Sensinode we’re proud to be TI’s 3rd party partner for IP networking -
Glad that you and your company are open to Zigbee adopting IP. I was worried that it might piss off the 6LoWPAN and IPSO camps since I don’t think the Zigbee Alliance discussed this too much with everyone.
I’m working on the Zigbee Cluster Library now which forms the basis for the application device profiles. I’m still waiting to get more details on what the transition and the spec will look like, but hopefully, an open source ZCL implementation will be in the wings so that things can get moving to IP quickly.
Sure, the 6LoWPAN and IPSO people will be estatic about ZigBee IP adoption!
Glad to hear an open-source ZCL implementation will be available, Contiki will be a really good place to work on integrating that over UDP/6LoWPAN. If you need any help collaborating on that just let me know.
See, another win for the Interwebz!
Definitely – but – it also means there is going to be a lot of work ahead of both camps:
- Educating the ZigBee community on IP technology
- Educating the IP community on ZigBee application profiles
- Actually integrating the standard into future ZigBee specs
- Standardizing ZigBee application protocols somewhere (IETF?)