Christopher Leidigh and Jim Higgins
Alektrona and ZigBee Alliance

This paper provides an overview of the ZigBee Alliance — a fee-based organization similar to PCI, USB, and SDIO groups. The participation in the ZigBee Alliance is global and the resulting specifications become open standards. There are many certified platforms and the number of shipping products continually increases.

ZigBee can be thought of as a combination of Ethernet, TCP/IP, RIP, and SNMP. However, it is wireless, natively supports mesh routing, and enables very low power consumption.