What is Zigbee and what is the relationship between Zigbee and TinyOS?
One of the goals of the Zigbee Alliance is to defining the network, security and application software layers for wireless networks for monitoring and control products. The lowest level of the communications stack defined by Zigbee is the networking level. Therefore, it is not a replacement for but rather compatible with TinyOS. That is, a Zigbee protocol could be written in TinyOS; indeed, there are several efforts for creating such a network layer on top of existing TinyOS MAC protocols. The Zigbee standards are only available to Zigbee Alliance members; that is, they are not open-source. Zigbee is not a MAC protocol, an operating system, or a hardware platform.
