ZigBee Alliance Ratifies Interoperability Standard for IoT Devices

The group also announces a partnership with the EnOcean Alliance to bring energy-harvesting capabilities to more connected devices and sensors.


Officials with the ZigBee Alliance a year ago announced that the group was unifying the various application-specific versions of its wireless specification into a single standard in hopes of accelerating interoperability between the billions of devices that make up the Internet of things.
The alliance in February 2016 will begin certifying products for ZigBee 3.0 after announcing Dec. 16 that the unified standard had just been ratified by the 425-member group.
The move is important not only for the millions of ZigBee-enabled products that already are on the market but for the larger push in the industry for greater communication and interoperability among the broad array of disparate devices, systems and sensors in the Internet of things (IoT). The new wireless development solution brings the various ZigBee versions into a common applications layer that supports all IoT development efforts.
"The key is the common applications layer," Tobin Richardson, president and CEO of the 13-year-old ZigBee Alliance, told eWEEK, adding that it brings together all the development work that has been done through the group since 2002.