The ZigBee Alliance announced new features for the ZigBee wireless specification giving more choices to manufacturers as they design ZigBee products. These new features significantly expand the capabilities of ZigBee, the organization says.

The ZigBee specification adds functionality to those released in 2006, giving manufacturers greater flexibility when designing ZigBee products. The original set of features published in 2006 is now known as the ZigBee Feature Set. An expanded set of features known as ZigBee Pro maximizes Zigbee capabilities and facilitates ease-of-use and advanced support for larger networks.

The features expand product development options available to manufacturers. The newly released Feature Sets are designed to interoperate with each other, ensuring long-term use and stability. Highlights of the expanded ZigBee Pro Feature Set include:

• Network scalability: Improved support for larger networks offering more management, flexibility, performance choices;
• Fragmentation: New ability to divide longer messages and enables interaction with other protocols and systems;
• Frequency agility: Networks dynamically change channels should interference occur;
• Automated device address management: Optimized for large networks with added network management and configuration tools;
• Group addressing: Offers additional traffic optimization needed for large networks;
• Wireless commissioning: Enhanced with secure wireless commissioning capabilities; and
• Centralized data collection: Tuned specifically to optimize information flow in large networks.

Access to the updated ZigBee specification is available to members. Free public availability of the new features is scheduled for early 2008.

www.zibgee.org