• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.104-112
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• 2006

ZigBee is the emerging industrial standard for ad hoc networks based on IEEE 802.15.4. It is used for low data rate and low power wireless network applications. Expected applications of ZigBee include wireless sensor networks for remote monitoring, home control, and industrial automation. Since one of the most important design goals of ZigBee is to reduce the installation and running costs, the ZigBee stack is embedded in the cheap and small micro-controller unit. The hierarchical routing algorithm is used for ZigBee end devices which have very limited resources. Using the block addressing scheme, end devices can send data to the destination without a routing table. However, hierarchical routing has the problem that the packets follow the tree hierarchy to the destination even if the destination is located nearby. In this paper, we propose a scheme to improve the hierarchical routing algorithm in ZigBee networks by employing the neighbor table that is originally used together with the routing table. We suggest selecting the neighbor node that has the minimum remaining hops to the destination as the next hop node. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme saves more than 30% of the hop counts compared with the original hierarchical routing.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2006.10c
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• pp.154-156
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• 2006

These days wireless sensor networks receive much attention from industry and researchers on various fields. The challenge is that wireless sensor networks have limited resources. Nevertheless, the route discovery in ZigBee sensor networks is performed by simple flooding when the original racket is rebroadcasted at least once by every node in a network. Such uncontrolled flooding generates an excessive number of packets competing for the media and causes a high collision rate. In this article, we propose a suitable packet Time-To-Live value to solve problems of uncontrolled flooding in ZigBee networks. It is shown that more sufficient route discovery in a ZigBee network can save network resources and lengthen the life of a sensor network.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.537-540
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• 2006

When multiple ZigBee wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are in close proximity to each other, contentions and collisions in transmissions will lead to increased packet delays. However, there is no existing study on how delay performance would be affected in a crowded real-life environment where each person walking down a busy street would be wearing a ZigBee WPAN. This letter studies the use of ZigBee WPANs in such a real-life environment for real-time heart beat monitoring. To be pragmatic, we derived a mobility pattern from the analysis of a real-life video trace. Then, we estimated the delay performance from the video trace by combining data collected from ZigBee experiments. The results show that the 300 ms packet delay requirement will not be met for only 11% of the time. When failure occurs, it will last for an average duration of 1.4 s.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.16 no.9
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• pp.1939-1946
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• 2012

USNs (Ubiquitous Sensor Networks) such as IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee network share ISM (Industrial, Scientific, and Medical) frequency band with WiFi networks. Once both networks operate in a region, packet collision may happen because of frequency overlapping. To assure this possibility, we conducted experiments where WiFi and ZigBee communication networks had been installed in an area. As a result of the test, successful data transmission rate were reduced due to the frequency overlapping between a WiFi communication channel and a ZigBee communication band. To cope with this problem, we propose a collision avoidance algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, if frequency collision is sensed, new communication channel with different frequency band is allocated to each node. Performance of the proposed frequency collision avoidance algorithm was tested and the results were described.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.7 no.5
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• pp.980-997
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• 2013

Nowadays, wireless communication has a great advantage in technology. We use wireless devices almost in all expected life such as: entertainment, working and recently in the healthcare area, where Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) become a hot topic for researchers and system designers. Recent work on WBANs focus on related issues to communication protocol, especially ZigBee network is fine tuned to meet particular requirements in healthcare area. For example, some papers present real-time patient monitoring via ZigBee communication given the short distance between body sensors and remote devices, while the other work solve the limited coverage problem of Zigbee by designing mechanisms to relay Zigbee data to other types of wire or wireless infrastructure. However, very few of them investigate the scenarios of ZigBee coexisting or integrated with other networks. In this paper, we present the real-time data transmission from ZigBee end devices to Wide Area Network (WAN), Worldwide interoperation for microwave access network (WiMAX) and Long Term Evolution network (LTE). We provide in detail the ZigBee gateway components. Our simulation is conducted by OPNET, we visualize many topology network scenarios in ZigBee hybrid system. The results in simulation show that ZigBee end devices can successfully transmit data in real-time to other network end devices.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.46 no.2
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• pp.73-80
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• 2009

Security is critically important for ubiquitous sensor networks that are usually used for the military and serveillance in environments that are opened to attacks, such as, eavesdroping, replay attacks of abnormal messages, forgery of the messages to name a few. ZigBee has emerged as a strong contender for ubiquitous sensor networks. ZigBee is used for low data rate and low power wireless sensor network applications. To deploy ubiquitous sensor networks, the collected information requires protection from an adversary over the network in many cases. The security mechanism should be provided for collecting the information over the network. However, the ZigBee protocol has some security weaknesses. In this paper, these weaknesses are discussed and a method to improve security aspect of the ZigBee protocol is presented along with a comparison of the message complexity of the proposed security protocol with that of the current ZigBee protocol.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.73-83
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• 2010

This paper investigates protocol architecture of a Web-ZigBee gateway for interconnecting TCP/IP-based networks and ZigBee/IEEE802.15.4-based wireless sensor networks. The Web-ZigBee gateway delivers data between the TCP/IP network and the ZigBee network. Since those two networks have different communication protocols, a protocol translation mechanism is needed. Herein, we propose a method to deliver query messages from the Internet to the sensor network and receive data from sensors. The protocol translation is performed in the translation layer that is placed above the two application layers, i.e., the Internet application layer and ZigBee application layer. Among various interfaces, we use CGI programming to take care of translation functions efficiently. The CGI manages query information from a client on the Internet and data from the ZigBee sensor network. Whereas the TCP/IP enabled sensor network overlays two heterogeneous communication protocols, overlaying layers increase the complexity and cost of implementing the sensor network. On the contrary, the sensors in our gateway-based system are not only light (because each communication protocol works independently without overlaying), but also efficient because the translation layer mostly alleviates header overloading.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.101-110
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• 2011

A smart grid networks delivers electricity from suppliers to consumers using digital technology with two-way communications to control appliances at consumers' homes to save energy, reduce cost and increase reliability and transparency. Security is critically important for smart grid networks that are usually used for the electric power network and IT environments that are opened to attacks, such as, eavesdroping, replay attacks of abnormal messages, forgery of the messages to name a few. ZigBee has emerged as a strong contender for smart grid networks. ZigBee is used for low data rate and low power wireless network applications. To deploy smart grid networks, the collected information requires protection from an adversary over the network in many cases. The security mechanism should be provided for collecting the information over the network. However, the ZigBee protocol has some security weaknesses. In this paper, these weaknesses are discussed and a method to improve security aspect of the ZigBee protocol is presented along with a comparison of the message complexity of the proposed security protocol with that of the current ZigBee protocol.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2006.10c
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• pp.117-119
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• 2006

BACnet(Building Automation and Control networks) is a standard data communication protocol designed specifically for building automation and control systems. BACnet provides five options for datalink layer protocols and these five datalink layer options can be applied with various transmission media. Recently wireless technology prevails in automation area. ZigBee is a standard protocol based on IEEE 802.15.4 for low-speed wireless communication network. In this study, we propose a BACnet/ZigBee model that uses ZigBee wireless technology in a BACnet communication network system as a wireless datalink layer protocol. We also applied this model to a lighting control system to evaluate the feasibility of proposed technology. The technology proposed in this paper can extend the application of BACnet not only for building automation but also for home automation by taking the advantages of ZigBee wireless communication technology in BACnet communication network systems.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.12B
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• pp.1514-1523
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• 2009

It is well known that the current wireless sensor networks addressing methods do not work efficiently in networks more than a few hundred nodes. A standard protocol in ZigBee-Standard feature in ZigBee 2007 gives balanced tree based address assignment method with distributed manner. However, it was limited to cover less than hundreds of sensor nodes due to the wasteful use of available address space, because composed sensor networks usually make an unbalanced tree topology in the real deployment. In this paper, we proposed the hierarchical cluster tree based address assignment method to support large and scalable networks. This method provides unique address for each node with distributed manner and supports hierarchical cluster tree on-demand. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces orphan nodes due to the address exhaustion and supports larger network with limited address space compared with the ZigBee distributed address assignment method defined in ZigBee-Standard feature in ZigBee 2007.