ZigBee?

'ZigBee' is a protocol which is developed to send and receive small amounts of data in between hostile Radio Frequency environments. ZigBee protocol is suitable and designed to be used by small, low power embeded devices such as sensors to transfer small amounts of data. 

Following are the advantages of using Zig Bee protocol.

1. Standard based
2. Low cost devices available
3. Has the ability to use globally
4. Reliable and self healing
5. Supports large number of nodes (up to 65,000 nodes per network)
6. Easy to deploy
7. provides long battery life.
8. Secure (128 bit AES encription)
9. Support multiple network topologies (ex: mesh, point to point, point to multipoint)
10. Collision avoidance, retries and acknowledgements is available
11. Low latency

A ZigBee network has the following components;

• ZigBee coordinator  - This is responsible for initializing managing and maintaining the network.
• ZigBee router - This is responsible for controlling the message routing between the nodes.
• ZigBee end device - This is the end point of a ZigBee network.

Image source : http://www.sena.com/products/industrial_zigbee/zigbee_summary.php

ZigBee can be utilized many business applications. Some of the examples can be mentioned as home automation, industrial plant monitoring and vehicle traffic monitoring etc.

Following is a figure which well describes the functionality of a Zig Bee network.

Image Source : http://www.sensor-networks.org/index.php?page=1129929946