8
Z-Wave
8.1 History and Management of the Protocol
The Z-wave protocol was designed by private company Zensys (www.zen-sys.com), based in the US and Denmark. Zensys is now a subsidiary of SIGMA Designs, a provider of system on chip (SoC) products for the multimedia and entertainment industry. Zensys started by introducing to the market, in 2001, a light-control system for consumers, and evolved its product to a full-fledged home area network meshed protocol implemented in a proprietary SoC.
Z-wave quickly became a very popular home automation protocol, with hundreds of products sold on web sites like www.zwaveproducts.com or www.zwaveworld.com. Zensys customers appreciate that Z-wave offers approximately the same features as its standard competitor 802.15.4 (ZigBee), but with fewer interoperability issues (due to the multi-vendor nature of the ZigBee ecosystem), and an unlicensed frequency band (868 MHz) that is often perceived to be less problematic than the crowded 2.4 GHz band.
Zensys OEMs using the protocol are grouped in the Z-wave alliance (www.z-wavealliance.org), which promotes awareness of the product, organizes developer's forums and interoperability testing events (“Unplugfest”). Z-wave products are certified by Zensys or agreed labs, using tools provided by Zensys, which test various network management functionalities and assess the communication error rate (CER) of the device under test at various distances.
The evolution of the system is managed by Zensys technical ...
