User's Manual

Table Of Contents

Telegesis (UK) Limited

TG-ETRX1-PM-01-106 6

ETRX1

Preliminary Product Manual 1.06

4. Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the ZigBee™ Alliance?

The ZigBee™ Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-

effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open

global standard.

The goal of the ZigBee™ Alliance is to provide the consumer with ultimate flexibility, mobility, and

ease of use by building wireless intelligence and capabilities into every day devices. ZigBee™

technology will be embedded in a wide range of products and applications across consumer,

commercial, industrial and government markets worldwide. For the first time, companies will have

a standards-based wireless platform optimised for the unique needs of remote monitoring and

control applications, including simplicity, reliability, low-cost and low-power.

• Why do we need ZigBee™ ?

Until The ZigBee™ Standard was ratified in December of 2004 there was no standard approach

that addressed the unique needs of most remote monitoring and control applications. The

ZigBee™ Standard enables the broad-based deployment of reliable wireless networks with low

complexity, low cost solutions and provides the ability for a product to run for years on inexpensive

primary batteries (for a typical monitoring application). It is also, of course, capable of

inexpensively supporting robust mesh networking technologies

• What is the EmberZNet Stack?

The Telegesis ETRX1 utilises the EmberNet/EmberZNet protocol stacks and can form a scalable,

self-organizing, self-healing wireless networking platform based on the ZigBee™ specifications.

The EmberZNet supports a variety of network topologies for wireless monitoring and control

applications, including mesh, star, and cluster tree. Applications running the EmberZNet stack can

be interoperable with other ZigBee™ nodes. EmberZNet provides all of the standard benefits that

come with ZigBee™ including: flexible topologies, high security, broad interoperability, low cost,

long battery life, and integrated network management. In addition, EmberZNet applications can

take advantage of the industrial strength reliability and unprecedented ease of use of the Ember

Transport Layer capabilities.

Until now, much of the cost of deploying sensing and control devices was in installing the network

to connect them. With EmberZNet, the value, like the network, is embedded in the devices

themselves. EmberZNet’s self-organizing, self-healing mesh algorithms produce networks that are

reliable, flexible, secure, and easy to use. Adding devices only makes EmberZNet sensing and

control networks stronger and more efficient. Designed from the ground up for developers of

sensing and control products, the EmberZNet product suite enables rapid development and

deployment of embedded wireless networks that virtually “see around corners,” and that have no

single point of failure.

The EmberZNet Protocol Stack is a compact, scalable implementation of the ZigBee

specifications which translates into lower cost MCU options for device manufacturers. The stack is

available in different configurations optimized for the various ZigBee node types; PAN

coordinators, full function devices, and reduced function devices. The stack is already available for

several microprocessor platforms supported by Ember.