The mission of the ZigBee Working Group is to bring about the existence of a broad range of interoperable consumer devices by establishing open industry specifications for unlicensed, untethered peripheral, control and entertainment devices requiring the lowest cost and lowest power consumption communications between compliant devices anywhere in and around the home.
The ZigBee membership includes Philips, Honeywell and Invensys Metering Systems, and others and is responsible for defining and maintaining higher layers above the MAC. The alliance is also developing application profiles, certification programs, logos and a marketing strategy. Philips Semiconductors and other chip vendors plan to launch their first ZigBee products as early as 2003. ZigBee was formerly known as PURLnet, RF-Lite, Firefly, and HomeRF Lite.
