Will RF4CE be the Killer Application for ZigBee?
By Cees Links, Founder & CEO • GreenPeak

Over the last decade, the ZigBee Alliance has been battling a myriad of other short range wireless standards to emerge as a popular technology. With this year’s adoption by RF4CE Alliance in order to embrace the consumer electronics market, ZigBee may have found its killer application. This joining of two complementary technologies is a synergistic win-win situation for both the consumer electronics industry as well as for ZigBee developers and vendors.

The RF4CE Alliance or “RF for Consumer Electronics” is an industry standards organization established by four of the major players in home electronics – Panasonic, Philips, Sony and Samsung. The companies have been working together to develop a new standard and technical specification for speeding up the adoption of low power RF (radio frequency) to replace the IR (infrared) technology that remote controls and home entertainment products had been relying upon for decades.

For the RF4CE Alliance, this partnership provides an immediate broad adoption in the consumer electronics industry, while avoiding the cost and time of establishing a “marketing machine” to achieve this.

This is a brilliant move for the ZigBee Alliance because it will allow it to evolve into a direction that will make it flourish further. For the consumer electronics market, and in particular for the end-customers, this adoption is a clear stake in the ground that opens up opportunities for a wide range of new and interesting applications.

In 1999, the ZigBee Alliance (www.zigbee.org) was spun off from the IEEE 802.11 organization, maybe better known via the Wi-Fi Alliance (www.wi-fi.org). The original goal was to establish and promote ZigBee as a simpler equivalent of Wi-Fi targeted for smaller embedded microprocessors.

What had made Wi-Fi so successful was its straight forward and easy to understand application focus (getting laptops on the Internet) combined with a clear technology environment (PCMIA-bus, TCP/IP, etc.). In contrast, after a quick start, ZigBee development started to sputter, as it was considered “too much for too many” and almost became “nothing for nobody”.

The application space that ZigBee tried to cover was too diverse: from homes, to buildings, to industrial, to energy management, etc. There was not a clear end-user application that separated ZigBee from the crowd of other short range and personal wireless networks.
The problem it created was twofold: too many diverging requirements leading to compromises that were just not good enough for most applications, plus there were too many different and diverse microprocessor platforms. Add to this the usual layer of company special interests and organizational politics and it is clear that standardization progress was an easy victim.

One example of these compromises is reliability versus energy consumption. Many industrial applications need a very high level of reliability while other applications can live with “normal” reliability, but need extreme low power consumption, so low that reliability is secondary. Which way should ZigBee go? There was no clear consensus.

The consequence was that ZigBee was not perceived as reliable enough and ISA (the standardization body for industrial automation) started to develop its own standard for industrial applications: ISA-100a.

On the other hand, ZigBee technology consumed too much power for energy harvesting applications, which motivated start-ups like Zensys and EnOcean to begin to develop their own proprietary low power communication “standards” for home and building automation.
Then out of “left field”, the killer application solution arrived: consumer electronics and remote controls – RF4CE.

Televisions and home entertainment systems are becoming more and more wireless. This encompasses the separation of the screen from the set top box and the use of multiple screens in different rooms, all wirelessly connecting to a single point of entry in the home. As a result, the set top box is no longer needs to be perched on the top of the TV box and now could disappear into the closet or inside a cabinet.

Even with this modularity, most TVs still required a remote control that used decades old infrared technology from last century. They required line of sight connectivity with the set top box (or the screen). But that prevents hiding the boxes away in the closet.
So, it was logical that remote controls would move into radio technology as well (like wireless phones and wireless Internet). Simultaneously, over the last few years, the leading television manufacturers (Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and Philips) had also started to dislike the lack of a standard for infra-red standard communications and had decided to establish one for radio based remote controls: RF4CE (announced in mid-2008).

In addition to be able to transmit through walls and furniture, RF offers many other benefits. It is two-way communication, so in the short future, if you can’t find your remote, you will be to stroll to your television, push a button and hear your remote control beeping. If you have children, you will defiantly appreciate this benefit.

But for the consumer electronics industry, another real important advantage is that standardized RF4CE remote controls can also support other home applications as well (like switching on/off or dimming the lights, opening the curtains, locking the doors, adjusting the heating or the air-conditioning).

However – this would require many other companies to “buy-in” to the technology and whoever has ever been involved in an industry standardization process understands how difficult that can be: hence the partnership with ZigBee. Becoming a member of the ZigBee family is an effective and inexpensive way to achieve rapid adoption of RF4CE for more than only consumer electronics.

This is a great move for ZigBee as well, as the home and building automation market is highly fragmented, with many small regional players that are geographically dispersed. Real solutions to any standardization proposal require critical mass, which is hard to achieve and often takes a long time.

The consumer electronics companies can deliver this mass acceptance (just realize the number of remote controls in your home and compare it with for instance the number of cell phones). By taking the initiative to adopt RF4CE, the discussion is immediately over: ZigBee RF4CE is the standard for home automation and by shear mass adoption it will be for building automation as well.

There is something else very interesting: the timing of the move.

RF4CE is solving an immediate problem for the consumer electronics companies, but RF4CE is still relatively flexible at the network integration level for becoming embedded within the overall ZigBee architecture. This leaves ZigBee a few interesting problems to solve without holding back on starting to generate critical mass almost immediately.

Also RF4CE is an excellent platform for the so-called battery-less applications (using energy harvesting), because of the simplicity of the application field that it is addressing.

So, whoever had thought that ZigBee would have to be written-off as only usable for some specific applications (like meter reading), needs to think again.

ZigBee has the opportunity to become the home and building automation network standard with a tremendous volume drive behind it that will help ZigBee, maybe with the necessary adaptations, to invade other application fields as well.

Cees Links is the founder and CEO of GreenPeak. Under his responsibility, the first wireless LANs were developed which ultimately became a house-hold technology integrated into the PCs and notebooks we are all familiar with. He also pioneered the development of Wi-Fi access points, home networking routers and hotspot base stations. Cees was involved in the establishment of the IEEE 802.11 standardization committee and the Wi-Fi Alliance. He was also instrumental in helping to establish the IEEE 802.15 standardization committee that became the basis for the ZigBee sense and control networking technology and standard. He can be reached at Cees.links@greenpeak.com.

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