ABSTRACT
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) standard1 is part of the IEEE 802 family of digital communication standards. The standard was published in October 2003, after three years’ development, and is now available by free download from the “Get IEEE 802TM” Web site.2 It is designed for low-cost, low-power applications that require relatively low data throughput (down to an average of less than 1 bps). It is not designed for wireless local area network (WLAN) service, nor is it optimized for multimedia, TCP/IP, or other applications that require a specific quality of service (QoS). It is also differentiated from IEEE 802.15.1TM(BluetoothTM) in several respects; it does not support isochronous voice, as Bluetooth does, for example, while it natively supports multihop networks, something Bluetooth does not do.
