Building Wireless Sensor Networks

Chapter 8. More to Love

Our final chapter serves as a broader introduction to sensor networking. You are now prepared to explore advanced communication techniques, share your data, and develop your own projects. Good job! Some of the ideas and techniques we look at in this chapter are pretty technical. That’s why they come here at the end, when you are in the best position to understand them. We’ll start with an overview of ZigBee application messaging, examine alternate routing techniques, peruse security options, and shine a light on serial flow control. To make sure that your data doesn’t languish on some local hard drive, this chapter also offers an example project for publishing your sensor network results publicly. Finally, we wrap up with a peek at the future of ZigBee and some suggestions for sharing your results with others.

Enjoyed what came before? There’s more to adore. Let’s go take a dip in the deep end!

Advanced ZigBee

While much of advanced ZigBee is beyond the general scope of this book, there are several things worth knowing when you need to enable larger systems or pursue inter-operation. You are now ready to meet these higher-level concepts and consider their implications for your projects. We’ll discuss ZigBee stack layers, standardized APS messaging, routing scenarios, security, and serial flow control. Finally we’ll point you toward reference material on the ZigBee standard.

Each of these sections is intended as a jumping-off point to get you started. Need to ...