ZigBee Alliance was established in 2002 and the alliance is described as open, non-profit and global. Any institution or company from the industry, anyone from universities and government agencies can acquire membership from the alliance. Current member profile is from international leader companies to start-up companies, from governmental regulatory groups to universities. The needs and novel ideas of the members determine the actions and the direction of the alliance. Engendering standards for low power, low data rate, user-friendly, reliable, innovative and “greener” products is their goal as there is a trend to minimize power consumption in every field of life and provide environment-friendly products. The catchy word “greener” is a nice point of attraction for the consumers.
The board and officers of ZigBee Alliance is formed by highly experienced experts from well known and successful companies and organizations such as Texas Instruments, Philips, Schneider Electric, STMicroelectronics, Ember Corporation, Kinney Consulting, White-Rodgers Division of Emerson, and IEEE. Those powerful officers and also other important members make the alliance reliable and governing competent authority. This could be one of the reasons why the ZigBee standards are developed in ZigBee Alliance and receive acceptance. Another is its openness to any interested individuals or groups. Being a global community appends reputation all over the world. Furthermore, the alliance does not only utilize the brainpower of a region or continent but the whole world and the decisions are taken by a consensus basis.
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For names and more information about the board and for the organization chart:
http://zigbee.org/About/AboutAlliance/BoardandOfficers.aspx
http://zigbee.org/About/AboutAlliance/OrganizationChart.aspx
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Nevertheless, what was the reason or first spark to establish such an alliance? Could not an international and leader company have created ZigBee Remote Control (RF4CE) standard and dominate the market? Actually, the answer lies within the properties of the standard. Acceptance from any region of the world, having good results faster and decrementing the risk of having an opponent, which may try to overtake you, are possible reasons. Additionally, it is sensible to think that the members of the alliance did not like the openness of formal standardization and desired to have a non-disclosure agreement till the standards become public. However, there is one more important factor called”interoperability.” Interoperability is the aptitude that a product or a process works with another products or processes in a flawless, compatible and lucid way. Interoperability issue gaining significance every moment, especially, as producers and developers are striving for automation in many fields of life. Home automation and remote control are just related examples to that. It is desired to provide the flexibility to users at selecting any brand for each device in their home environment and to faultlessly and easily connect those devices each other even if they have various brands. When someone has a ZigBee remote controller, he should be able to control any devices with remote control feature at home or office and the devices should be working in harmony being aware of the existence of others. In that way, users will feel comfort, enjoy the automation at home and control the technology there effortlessly. The plan of the alliance is to apply interoperability among multi-vendor, multi-network and multi-service environment with all interested parties via well defined transparent procedures. Interoperability is also one of the aims of the standardization.
Another question that comes to my mind is why has not it been developed in another organization? IEEE has already got a standard for personal area networks which is named as IEEE802.15.4. Thus, IEEE might have been a good candidate for ZigBee standards. However, IEEE802.15.4 standard only defines the physical layer specifications and medium access layer (MAC). It does not deal with higher levels. In general, the studies of IEEE802.15.4 group are about specifying the physical layer and MAC layer. Actually, IEEE 802.15.4 is intended to provide fundamental lower layer specifications for advanced techniques applying low data rate, low power and low cost architectures such as ZigBee, WirelessHART (Highway Addressable Remote Transducer => Self-organizing synchronized mesh architecture) and MiWi (or MiWi P2P) which is developed mainly for wireless sensor networks. New ZigBee standard required the planning of not just the bottom two layers but also the upper layers. It was not necessary to define any upper layer for infrared technology in remote control; however, it was crucial for ZigBee Remote Control standard since a network is initialized and the devices communicate in a two-way mode. Therefore, considering the narrower scope of IEEE 802.15.4 group, it has been essential to have another organization and create a new standard with respect to the common needs.
Firstly, RF4CE Consortium was founded in June 2008 by Panasonic Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd and Sony Corporation in order that they can create a new standard for RF based remote control for audio visual devices. Later, on 3 March 2009, they decided to join forces with the ZigBee Alliance since the alliance had already been dealing with ZigBee which has been a highly suitable platform for RF remote controls with intelligence. This unity strengthened the hand of the ZigBee Alliance. The members of the ZigBee Alliance were highly experienced in their field and had desire to form the standards by themselves rather than being a part of another organization where they might not have found a chance to act or decide at their will or might not have had responses fast enough. Within the alliance, the standard has been available to them with every improvement steps much before it became public. This gives the chance to be the first in the market and they have become clear and motivated about new standards or design architectures regarding ZigBee after exploiting the advantageous position that they have. Even though it is an open and public standard, there is difference between attending the engendering process of the standard, being first to access it and just getting the prepared standard to utilize. As a result, in a commercial point of view, forming such an alliance has been beneficial for all the participating parties. Moreover, open and public manner of the alliance stands against any discussion regarding the transparency of the applied techniques or accusations of disclosing data to avoid market competition and keeping the technology as a secret.
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