Z-Wave Home Automation Standard

Z-wave is a Wireless communication protocol designed for home automation. it is used in Residential Remote control applications. Currently this is becoming favorite

choice of all manufacturers . because of its features .

Sigma Designs owns the intellectual property and is one of two chip makers for the Z-Wave home control technology.

below are some of the features of Z-Wave Home Automation Standard .

• Reliable & Low latency communication of small data packets with data rate upto  i.e. 100 Kbits / Sec , Not similar to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth which are IEEE 802.11 standards,, designed for High bandwidth data flow.
• Avoid interference with Wi-fi and Bluetooth .
• Supported over 250 Manufacturers and works in US, Europe and Asia .
• May include upto 232 nodes . Average communication between two nodes is around 30.5 m .
• Operates around 900 MHz frequency range .  The Z-Wave Radio uses the 868.42 MHz SRD Band (Europe); the 900 MHz ISM band: 908.42 MHz (United States); 916 MHz (Israel); 919.82 MHz (Hong Kong); 921.42 MHz (Australian/New Zealand).
• Mesh Network Architecture.

Z-Wave follows Mesh network topology . There are some main network topologies like : Partial Mesh , Full Mesh , Star and Ring .

In Z-Wave Mesh Network , Network has a Network ID and all nodes connected with that network also have unique ID , i.e. Node ID.
through these node ID , all nodes / devices are identified .

• Two – Way Communication - in Z-Wave , there is a functionality of Acknowledgment from the device , when they receive commands .   

License:  Some Z-wave vendors have Open Source Options.

A Project named OpenZwave is an example , They have done development without using any expensive software development Kit . Libraries can be pound from below link :
http://code.google.com/p/open-zwave/


Network :
As we have seen that Z-wave uses mesh network topology to connect all devices with each other .
it contains a central controller with which all the devices are paired. Functionality of pairing works similar to pairing any Bluetooth headset with our Mobile phone. each devices generally has a link button , with that button we can set devices in search / include mode for pairing up .

List of some devices : Click Here

Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave
http://www.z-wave.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Designs

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