XIX IMEKO World Congress Fundamental and Applied Metrology September 6!11, 2009, Lisbon, Portugal BASIC CHARACTERISTICS OF ZIGBEE AND SIMPLICITI MODULES TO USE IN MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS L. Skrzypczak 1 ) , D. Grimaldi 2) , R. Rak 3) 1) Department of Electronics, Computer and System Sciences, University of Calabria, Rende – CS, Italy, slk@data.pl 2) Department of Electronics, Computer and System Sciences, University of Calabria, Rende – CS, Italy, grimaldi@deis.unical.it 3) Institute of the Theory of Electrical Engineering, Information and Measurement Systems, Electrical Engineering Faculty, Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, rrak@okno.pw.edu.pl Abstract – The main goal of this paper is to experimental examine some of the properties of two different wireless communication modules, ZigBee and SimpliciTI, which are employing two different transmission standards. This paper is a part of wider research aimed to examine and evaluate the different wireless transmission standards to use in distributed measurement systems. Keywords : ZigBee; SimpliciTI; Distributed Measurement Systems 1. INTRODUCTION The use of new wireless transmission standards in measurement systems is described by some requirements of industrial applications such those presented in [1] which are (i) integration into existing measurement systems, (ii) coordination of the advanced and traditional monitoring structures, and (iii) design of innovative measurement systems. This paper is an attempt to examine two different wireless transmission standards named ZigBee and SimpliciTI in order to meet those requirements. SimpliciTI is Texas Instruments proprietary network protocol [2] for low-power radio frequency wireless communication. Main properties of SimpliciTI are [2]: Low cost which means that SimpliciTI network protocol can be implemented in systems with small memory capacity. According to [2] as low as 8 kB of ROM and 1 kB of RAM is needed to implement SimpliciTI. Flexibility which is achieved by multiple network topologies namely star and peer-to-per (p2p) [2]. The basic Application Programmers Interface (API) makes SimpliciTI simple to be used. Wide selection of transceiver chips made to work with SimpliciTI operating in sub-1GHz frequencies and in 2.4 GHz band [3] makes this protocol versatile. Finally very low current consumption in sleep state [2] makes SimpliciTI very well suited for battery powered applications. ZigBee is wireless communication standard managed by the ZigBee Alliance and is based on the standard IEEE 802.15.4 physical and Media Access Control (MAC) layers [4]. Main properties of ZigBee are [5]: Flexible network topology. Simple star topology as well as more complicated mesh topology are possible. This makes ZigBee easy to install because when using mesh topology network range is not limited to maximum range of the single device. ZigBee scalability is also achieved by static and dynamic star and mesh topology allowing mode than 65000 nodes with low latency to be connected to the same network [5]. Low power is achieved by allowing long periods of non- communication without the need for re-synchronisation [5]. Because ZigBee Alliance is not limited to one company many manufacturers produce ZigBee modules and equipment such antennas. This makes competition on the market which means low prices. The cause of choosing these two transmission standards is that they were designed for monitoring and control applications [5], [2]. Such applications are closely related to measurement systems field. This paper is a presentation of characteristics of both standards in the area of measurement systems. The following sections describe the measured parameters, the methodology of making presented measurements, used wireless modules and environmental conditions under which all presented measurements were made. At the end the conclusion is made on the basis of experimental results. 2. RESEARCH OVERVIEW Characteristics of tested modules is based on Quality of Service (QoS) parameters. These parameters derived from [6] are listed in Table 1. 1456 ISBN 978-963-88410-0-1 © 2009 IMEKO