Performance Evaluation of ZigBee Network for Embedded Electricity Meters
KUI LIU
Masters’ Degree Project Stockholm, Sweden Sep 2009
XR-EE-RT 2009:020
Abstract ZigBee is an emerging wireless technology for low power, low data rate and short range communications between wireless nodes, which is showing a promising future. This research provides an overview of 802.15.4 and ZigBee standard. A test bench was created to evaluate the performance of ZigBee network for electricity meters applications. The results from the test show that ZigBee supports a large network size, a range of 75m within line of sight, a fairly large effective data rate that is enough for metering traffic and very low power consumption devices. These characteristics are very suitable for electricity meters applications where cost and power consumption is the major concern.
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Acknowledgements My deepest gratitude goes first and foremost to my supervisor Jimmy Kjellsson, for his constant guidance and encouragement and also for the help throughout all phases of this thesis; And Henrik Sandberg, for his patient help and illuminating instruction through all the stages of writing the report. I also owe my sincere gratitude to Niclas Ericsson for the help of programming and wonderful advices. I would also like to thank Thomas Lindh, Viktoria Fodor from KTH and Tomas Lennvall for being very supportive during the thesis work. Thanks also to Karl Henrik Johansson, Jimmy Kjellsson and Tobias Gentzell for being part of the interview and offering me this great opportunity to work with this wonderful group. Last my thanks would go to my friends I made in Västerås, for all the good times spent together, and also for your being so nice and supportive all the time.
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Table of Contents
Abstract...... 2 1. Project Introduction ...... 9 1.1 Motivation ...... 9 1.2 Problem Formulation ...... 10 1.3 Contributions ...... 11 1.4 Outline ...... 11
2. Introduction to ZigBee and Z-Stack ...... 12 2.1 ZigBee Introduction ...... 12 2.1.1 General introduction ...... 12 2.1.2 Operational mode ...... 14 2.1.3 ZigBee layer structure...... 18 2.1.4 ZigBee frame