ZigBee Meets ZigBee Green Power
ZigBee meets Green Power!
In ZigBee-3.0 specification suites, ZigBee Alliance promotes the use of ZigBee Green Power, however not people understands what it is.
However, ZigBee Green Power is in fact not new. Look back to 2012, ZigBee Green Power already emerges as an optional feature of ZigBee Pro. Perhaps due to lack of Green Power devices at that time, not many ZigBee stacks support the optional feature .
ZigBee Green Power is designed with ultra-low operations in mind. Thus it is possible to create ZigBee Green Power devices using batteries or even without batteries. This maintenance-free nature makes ZigBee Green Power attractive in certain application fields.
Inter-operability Problems
Making ZigBee Green Power an optional feature however creates inter-operability problems.
As one kind of self-organizing, ad-hoc digital radio network, ZigBee has the one important perspective: inter-operability. It should enable devices from different manufacturers to work together seamlessly. No matter manufacturers, ZigBee stacks，and radio chips, ZigBee devices should inter-operate.
But due to ZigBee Green Power is an optional feature, many ZigBee stack implementations do not support it. Often a user tries to use a ZigBee Green Power device in a ZigBee network, it can not work unfortunately.
ZigBee Alliance finally addresses the problems by phasing out old ZigBee standards (ZHA and ZLL for example), meanwhile promoting ZigBee-3.0. One of ZigBee-3.0’s target is to improve inter-operability between certified ZigBee-3.0 devices.
ZigBee Green Power in ZigBee-3.0
ZigBee-3.0 specification suites now defines basic ZigBee Green Power support as a mandatory feature. This means all ZigBee-3.0 certified devices should at least support the baseline. The baseline is: capable of transporting messages for ZigBee Green Power devices in ZigBee network.
Interestingly, several months ago some ZigBee test house friends told me a rising in requests for obsolete ZigBee certifications. Low-end ZigBee devices however was trying to grasp their last chance.
There is a nice white paper on ZigBee Green Power from ZigBee Alliance (link).
Green Power Device & ZigBee Green Power Infrastructure Device
ZigBee Green Power technology contains two enablers: the Green Power device, and the Green Power Infrastructure device.
People sometimes get confused between these two.
A Green Power device is often the ultra-low power consumption device. In smart lighting for example, a green power device can be a wireless switch, or a wireless sensor.
Manufacturers can adopt energy harvesting technologies for Green Power devices, so a wireless switch can be battery-less, and gets the power from finger pressing to transmit Green Power messages.
A lightweight ZigBee Green Power stack runs on Green Power devices. The stack stays just above 802.15.4 MAC layer, and transmits / receives compact data frames called Green Power data frames (GPDF).
On the other hand, ZigBee Green Power infrastructure devices are often ZigBee devices. They can be ZigBee coordinators, ZigBee routers, or ZigBee end devices. Besides supports standard ZigBee functionality, Green Power feature is also added to ZigBee stacks.
The Green Power feature consists of GP stub, and GP cluster residing on endpoint 242.
The original GPDFs, generated by Green Power devices, are then transported by ZigBee infrastructure devices within ZigBee network.
That is it.
More
To know more, feel free to check the slides I made 🙂
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