The past several years have witnessed a rapid development in the wireless network area. So far wireless networking has been focused on high-speed and long range applications. However, there are many wireless monitoring and control applications for industrial and home environments which require longer battery life, lower data rates and less complexity than those from existing standards. What the market need is a globally defined standard that meets the requirement for reliability, security, low power and low cost. For such wireless applications a new standard called ZigBee has been developed by the ZigBee Alliance based upon the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.

The aim of this diploma work is to design fully functional ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4 modules, and to evaluate an application in a sensor network.

This diploma work has resulted in two fully functional ZigBee and IEEE 802.15.4 modules, respectively. It is also shown that ZigBee sensors can be networked wirelessly. Eventually it is the authors hope that the modules will be used within ITN, and also be developed further for new applications.