Sleepy Routers in Zigbee Network

Phil Vergers

Other Parts Discussed in Thread: CC2630

Hi,

I am looking at an application which, due to physical layout, requires routers to be very low power (battery operated) and therefore able to sleep between communications to maintain a suitable power budget.

I have seen articles that suggest that Zigbee does not support sleeping routers, however I saw this old article with a similar problem, and something of a possible solution:

e2e.ti.com/.../32041

This article is now quite old, I wondered if there was now some more knowledge on what I am would have thought to be not such an unusual use-case.

For some more back ground, information transfer is only required between each node and the coordinator, generally for the reporting of measured data.

Looking to use the CC2630

over 10 years ago

0 Firefighter over 10 years ago

TI__Genius 12480 points

Open Source Contiki OS, which has an IPv6/6LoWPAN stack and mesh, supports Sleepy routers might be of interest? CC2630 is supported.

www.ti.com/contiki-6lowpan-wiki
http://contiki-os.org/
github.com/.../contiki

Cheers,
Jonas

0 TheDarkSide over 10 years ago in reply to Firefighter

TI__Genius 16570 points

Hi,

if your goal is to start your development now and need a mesh solution with routers that are sleeping, I would strongly recommend you follow Jonas' suggestions and start using Contiki 6LoWPAN.

SimpleLink Ultra Low Power CC2630 device is supported in Contiki 6LoWPAN.

Thanks,

TheDarkSide

0 Phil Vergers over 10 years ago in reply to Firefighter

Intellectual 660 points

Thanks Jonas,

The ContikiMAC duty cycling mechanism looks promising and I will read into its suitability.

Is that to say that ZigBee is actually not suitable at it does not support sleeping routers?

Are you aware of any drawbacks or limitations of Contiki 6LoWPAN compared to ZigBee

0 YiKai Chen over 10 years ago in reply to TheDarkSide

Guru 735685 points

If the sleeping router goes to sleep and some device need it to route message, what would happen? Do you have power consumption information of sleeping router?

0 Phil Vergers over 10 years ago in reply to YiKai Chen

Intellectual 660 points

Hi YK Chen,
Routers all need to be awake at the right time to see an incoming message and propagate it. This therefore requires some form of synchronization. Note that it will also likely introduce some lag into the system, for my application this is an acceptable trade-off.

We are looking at a budget of around 5mA @ 3.3V (16.5mW) average.
With a very low bandwidth requirement (transmissions in the order of a couple of hundred bytes per minute)

Phil

0 Phil Vergers over 10 years ago in reply to TheDarkSide

Intellectual 660 points

Thanks Darkside,
I appreciate your confirmation, and will have a look at going down this path. I was a little concerned about the increased overhead required for IPV6/6LoWPAN where our payload is very small (typically around 100bytes).

Phil

0 YiKai Chen over 10 years ago in reply to Phil Vergers

Guru 735685 points

Hi Phil,
I see and Thanks for the detail explanation.

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Sleepy Routers in Zigbee Network