During last years, cooperating with leading chip manufacturers and customer companies, Studio Progettazioni Elettroniche acquired experience on architectural definition, design and test of wireless networs both for Home/Building Automation applications and WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks).
In this field, besides many "proprietary" type protocols, new "standard" type protocols were born enabling the designer to setup wireless networks starting from the full mesh type downto those having an architecture (star and tree or cluster-tree) more limited but characterized by a more simple management and an extremely low power consumption (i.e. SimpliciTI (TM) protocol by Texas Instruments).
The ZigBee(TM) standard, based on the LR-WPAN IEEE 802.15.4 standard, is an emerging technology specially conceived for Home/Building Automation application and, generally, for wireless sensor networks. Its characteristics of low cost per node, low data rate and, particularly, of limited power consumption, together with its "interoperability", lets ZigBee be the ideal technology in wireless battery-supplied sensor applications allowing battery life-time upto many years (application dependant).
It is available, for those interested in entering the wireless networks' field, technical level courses exploiting the following arguments:
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IEEE 802.15.4 - PHY layer
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IEEE 802.15.4 - MAC layer
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ZigBee (TM) - NWK layer
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ZigBee (TM) - Application layer (APS + Framework + ZDO)
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ZigBee (TM) -Interference problems
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ZigBee (TM) -Test methods
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SimpliciTI (TM) - low power Texas Instruments open-source protocol