Zigbee over Wifi for home entertainment?

My Wifi signal seems to be intermittent in certain areas of my house, so I am seeking an alternative.

But first let me discuss my requirements:

1. Connecting all devices in my home on 3 different floors; mostly being PCs, Phones, Ethernet TV, and of course the X-Box 360.

2. Connect all PCs in my garage machines shop. (A high noise environment)

3. And connectivity in the surrounding yard, over an acre, would be nice too.

I like Zigbee due to its mesh network topology. I assume it would work well for high noise areas, which is the most critical for me. Anyone work with Zigbee for factories or other high interference locations?

For the record, I am connecting all devices ultimately to a 20mbps Internet connection from RCN.

Catwell

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Tags: zigbee, communication, short-range, internal_wireless_connection

GardenState
451 posts since
Oct 26, 2009

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1. Apr 12, 2010 4:01 PM (in response to Cabe Atwell)
Re: Zigbee over Wifi for home entertainment?

Zigbee doesn't have the bandwidth if you want to send TV/video content between devices but if it is simply a control function you are after consider Radio Frequency for Consumer Electronics (RF4CE) a Zigbee-based protocol standard for remote control of consumer electronics finalized about a year ago.

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Chris_Pinter

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2. Apr 29, 2010 6:54 PM (in response to Cabe Atwell)
Re: Zigbee over Wifi for home entertainment?

Hello Cabe,

This is Chris Pinter. I am an RF Engineer with Pinter Electronics Consultants. http://www.pinterec.ca

Our lab has done a fair amount of research in the area of the interoperability between Zigbee, Wi-Fi bluetooth and other 2.4 GHz radio systems that operate in the 2.4 Ghz ISM band. Our research has shown that the zigbee protocol is rather weak when it come to interoperability. The zigbee transmission is very susceptible to any noise in the 2.4 GHz ISM band, even microwave ovens.

For a home entertainment system you definitely want to go with a Wi-Fi system. There are many types of Wi-Fi to consider so make sure to get one uses maximum bandwidth. There are many 802.11g products out there that use multiply channels to transmit this allows for larger bandwidth so was to limit the effects of noise.

If you are considering developing a wireless home entertainment system, please check out how we can help with your Wi-Fi design.

http://www.pinterec.ca/services/wireless-development/wifi-device-development

Hope this helps,

Chris Pinter

When our radio absolutely must work.... You need a specialist... Choose the best.

Pinter Electronics Consultants.

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