A brief discussion on the selection of wireless sensor technology

With the continuous development of technology, more and more companies have made wireless transceiver chips, microcontrollers and wireless transceivers into a system on chip (SoC). For example, TI uses ZigBee wireless microcontrollers such as CC2430/CC2431 with 8051 core. As wireless sensor networks have higher requirements for computing power, Freescale has recently launched 32-bit ZigBee wireless microcontrollers with ARM core. Using these SoC wireless microcontrollers to design wireless sensor networks will make wireless sensor nodes smaller, lower power consumption and lower price; TI's domestic technical partner Wireless Dragon Technology Co., Ltd. also provides technical support for these chips and development tools.

The second part of the wireless sensor network architecture is the embedded software running inside the microcontroller or wireless microcontroller, also known as the software protocol stack (network stack). The network stack has two responsibilities. First, it must handle the frequent changes in the quality of wireless link communication between nodes and the interference of environmental factors on wireless communication, and have the ability to self-organize and self-recover the network; the second function of the network stack is to have a strong routing algorithm capability to ensure that information is reliably and efficiently sent from the source node (if existing, it can be sent through hundreds or thousands of routing nodes) to the target node through various network topologies (star/mesh, etc.). Ensure the real-time requirements of communication.

The ZigBee Alliance is an independent standards organization composed of many technology suppliers and developers. It is also the world's largest alliance providing network software protocol stack standards based on the IEEE 802.15.4 platform.

The organization has been developing from ZigBee2004, ZigBee2006, and ZigBee2007, and currently provides two network stacks: ZigBee and ZigBee PRO. From the perspective of use, the ZigBee stack is very suitable for small networks that generally contain ten to several hundred nodes. ZigBee PRO is a superset of ZigBee, which adds some functions to expand the network and better deal with wireless interference from other technologies. It can adapt to larger networks and has more reliable routing communication algorithms and wireless communication reliability.