Beginner - Trying to Create a Tree Network - MC1321X

[wareagle]

Hello,
My team and I are working on a senior design project where we are attempting to create a building access control system using the 802.15.4/Zigbee standard.  We have been playing with one of the Freescale development kits (MC1321x) and have been able to do some of the basic demos, but now we are trying to create a multi-hop network.

 Basically, we are trying to cover a 4-story building with approximately 6 nodes per floor, and each node consists of something like a keypad or cardswipe to allow a user to authenticate themselves in order to gain access to a room.  We know that a simple star network will not provide sufficient coverage, so we are planning on constructing some sort of tree topology.  There will be one PAN coordinator on the 1st floor, and the rest of the nodes (ideally) will only be the individual FFDs at each door capable of routing traffic from other nodes to the coordinator (i.e. no nodes that are simply routers).  Also, I assume this will be a non-beaconed network as the majority of the data flow will be randomly originating from the nodes (as opposed to a constant flow of data in a typical sensor network).

The problem is that my team is made up mainly of EE majors, not software engineers, so I feel a little overwhelmed.  As far as I can tell, there are not any demos in the Beekit for tree or mesh networks (all I've seen are the star network demo for MAC and the home automation stuff for Beestack).  Have I missed them? Does anyone know of some simple demo code that we can download and have a look at, or a good resource for learning to program a simple tree/mesh network? At this point we are planning to stick with the simplicity of the MAC codebase, but we can move to Beestack if that makes things easier. Thank you very much, and I apologize for such a long post!

Kurt

Added p/n to subject.

Message Edited by NLFSJ on 2008-02-11 01:54 PM

[RickN]

Hi Kurt,

    Another possible option is the PopNet protocol from San Juan Software.  Check it out at www.sanjaunsw.com. 

   PopNet uses 802.15.4 transceivers, like the MC1321x, includes full mesh networking, and is supposed to be easy for developers to work with.  I haven't used it, but it may be useful for your situation. 

   Thanks,

       Rick

[wareagle]

Mads, thanks for your reply.  I'm not sure how I missed that documentation, but it is indeed useful and I am currently working through it.

Rick- PopNet looks great, thank you so much for suggesting it.  If its as good as they say it is, it looks like it will be very useful for us.  I'm waiting to hear back from them on obtaining an evaluation of their codebase.

Thank you all again,
Kurt

[RickN]

Kurt,

   Please let me know how things go with PopNet.  I am very interested in this protocol, and think it should be useful for a lot of my customers. 

   Feel free to contact me directly,  Richard.Nardone@freescale.com

      Thanks,

           Rick

[addiyi]

The MAC layer only provide support for one-to-one and one-to-many message passing between devices, synchronization and other low level functionality. You will need to write your own NWK layer and implement any network topology your application requires. The easiest alternative is to use BeeStack, the Freescale full implementation of the ZigBee stack. In BeeStack are implement both mesh and tree networks. You can change the type of network from: Stack library configuration (without mesh routing = tree routing).  You can select any demo applications from BeeStack to learn more about mesh/tree network. Also I recommend you to read documents that are finding in: \BeeKit Documentation\BeeStack Documents (folder where BeeKit is installed).

Regards

[wareagle]

Thank you addiyi, I was afraid we would probably have to move up to Beestack.  One more question about the Beestack demos:  Most of them are for the home automation example.  Is there something peculiar or unique about these HA demos, or would they make good starting points that we could take one and modify it for our project? Thanks again.

[Mads]

wareagle,

It depends on what you want to do. If you plan of using Home automation/lighting applications the HA demo apps are a good starting point. But If you plan to make a proparitary application the Generic App is the best starting point.

I would highly recommend that you read and perform the steps descibed in the ZigBee Applications User's guide (to learn how to use the applications) and the Beestack Application Development guide (to learn how to develop a small example ZigBee application).

BR,

Mads