Smart Lighting Control with Zigbee

With the development of technology, lighting is becoming more and more intelligent in our daily life. The smart lighting control enable automatic and dimmable lighting. Fixtures are on or off automatically through wireless control. Regardless of homes or commercial buildings, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Zigbee are popular wireless lighting control technologies. Commercial buildings require the lighting control with integrated management and lower consumption. Unlike the point to point connection of Bluetooth, Zigbee offers a mesh network for controlling. Therefore, Zigbee is widely used in commercial buildings. This post would like to talk about basic information of Zigbee and how it works in lighting control.

What is Zigbee

Zigbee is a wireless communication technology based on IEEE802.15.4 protocol (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers), which is also known as LR-WPAN (Low-rate Wireless Personal Area Networks). Zigbee is characterized as short range, low complexity, low power digital radios and low cost protocol specification. Bees rely on flying and "buzzing" (zig) shaking their wings to transmit their location and distance of pollen. The communication way forms a “network” in group. Zigbee is named after the similar information transmission method of bees. Zigbee is maintained by Zigbee Alliance, which was re-branded to CSA (Connectivity Standard Alliance) in May 2021 .

Advantages of Zigbee  

The advantages of Zigbee are low power consumption, low cost, large capacity, fast respond and high safety.

• Low power consumption: Zigbee can be powered by battery. A small coin cell is capable to offer a long lasted time for per nodes.

• Low cost: Simplified protocols reduce the cost and requirements of communication controller. Using the free band (2.4Hz) also helps to lower the cost of Zigbee.
• Large capacity: The Zigbee network layer supports star, mesh and cluster-tree topology. Thus Zigbee can reach hundreds of nodes in the same network, consisting a large network.
• Fast respond: Generally, Zigbee takes 15ms from sleeping condition to start and 30ms for connecting nodes to network. The respond speed is more faster than Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
• High safety: The use of security settings, ACL (Access Control List) and symmetric cryptography with AES28 prevents unauthorized access to data, ensuring the safety.

Limitations of Zigbee

The primary limitations of Zigee are the short range and low data rate.

• Short range: The transmission distance of Zigbee is limited by the low power consumption. The transmission distance ranges from 10 to 100 meters in common condition. By adding RF, the transmission distance can be extended to 3Km.
• Low data rate: Zigbee has low data rate in about 10Kbps to 250Kbps. It is only suitable for low data rate applications, such as transmitting intermittent data from a sensor.

How Zigbee works in lighting control

To figure out how Zigbee works in lighting control, we have to learn about more information about Zigbee.

Layered model of Zigbee:

EEE 802.15.4 Standard

Zigbee is based on IEEE 802.15.4 standard, which including physical layer and medium access control layer. The two lower layer is mainly responsible for wireless communication, frame encryption and access control.

Zigbee network components

A Zigbee network is mainly consisted by five components:

• Zigbee Coordinator: 

A device responsible for starting network, controlling operation and assigning device address. Coordinator is the roof and bridge to other networks. There is only one coordinator in a Zigbee network,so the coordinator is the most capable device.

• Zigbee Router: The router transmits data to and from Zigbee devices.
• Zigbee Trust Center: The trust center is important in security of all Zigbee devices. With the trust center, one device can be trusted by another.
• Zigbee End Device: The end device is a leaf node without data transmission function.
• Zigbee Gateway: The gateway acts as the the bridge of Zigbee and other network.

There is a table of the specification of Zigbee.

Lighting control with Zigbee

A simplified Zigbee network is a coordinator start the network with order, and then the router transmits the data to Zigbee end device and execute the order. But normally the end devices are not in the same network with Zigbee in reality. Thus, gateway is acted as the bridge of Zigbee and other networks.

For the lighting control system with Zigbee, the smart phone or remote controller is the device that plays the role of coordinator to start the transmission and send control orders. Gateway connects Wi-Fi (wireless local area network) or Ethernet of smart phone or remote controller with Zigbee LED lamps. Gateway enable Zigbee lamps interoperable with smart phone or remote controller. Zigbee receives and forwards the commands to lamps. At last, LED lamps receive and execute the commands.

The diagrams of smart phone lighting control with Zigbee are as followed:

Smart lighting control is critical for commercial buildings as it helps to reduce electricity bills and lighting efficiency. A smart lighting system is flexible, efficient and economical. With Zigbee, you can control individual or groups of fixtures by your phone or remote controller. If necessary,  sensors are added on fixture. Then, fixtures are on or off automatically according to daylight, timer or motion of people.

AGC also provide high quality commercial lighting solutions with Zigbee. This smart control system consist of Dimmable LED Light, Gateway, Router, Zigbee controller module and iLightsIn Pro APP. Firstly, connect specific WIFI from router and enter APP interface. Secondly, add gateway and login in with default user name and password, the Gateway will search Zigbee lamps automatically when adding the devices. After that, you can control the lights individually or by grouping, Switching or dimming whatever you want. Moreover, we also offer additional functions, such as electricity measurement and failure statistics automatically so that customer can get real-time feedback of all lamps, which will help to reduce labor cost on maintenance. Daylight sensor and motion sensors can be also added on our LED light to achieve integrated smart lighting system. If your are interested in the lighting solution with Zigbee, please contact us.