ZigBee is a wireless communication protocol standard developed for Personal Area Networks and Local Area Networks. This technology is intended to require low energy and have low data rate. It is based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard. At the time of writing the newest ZigBee standard is ZigBee 3.0 which is built on ZigBee PRO.
- It uses 2.4GHz ISM Band like Bluetooth globally and it also enables regional operation at 868Mhz for America and 915Mhz for Europe. It uses:
- - 16 channels each of which 2MHz wide in 2.4GHz ISM Band with a data throughput of of 250Kbits/s.
- - 27 channels for 915-921MHz with a data throughput of of 10 Kbits/s.
- - 63 channels for 868MHz with a data throughput of of 100 Kbits/s.
- ZigBee 3.0 can reach a range of 300m outdoors, when transmitter and receiver devices are in line of sight and can reach 75m-100m for indoor usage which makes its usage suitable for indoor positioning.
- For positioning systems, wireless signal interference is an important issue that should be handled and ZigBee mitigates this problem having 16 separate channels in 2:4GHz ISM band where several of these channels do not overlap with European and US versions of Wi-Fi.