ECHONET and ZigBee To Develop Certification Program

Zigbee Alliance and the ECHONET consortium have recently announced plans to develop a certification program for products based on ECHONET standards.  This will be based on ECHONET Lite products using the ZigBee IP wireless mesh networking communications protocol.  Now designers and implementers will have the peace of mind knowing that products that are certified meet the required standards to interoperate seamlessly.

Both organisations are established bodies in producing M2M communication standards for the connected home.  ECHONET Lite standard has been endorsed by the Japanese Smart House Standard by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Zigbee has been around for over ten years and is a trusted framework for Internet of Things.

The collaboration between both bodies now offers manufacturers a cost-effective and energy-efficient wireless mesh network based on standard Internet protocols, 6LoWPAN, RPL, TCP, IPv6, PANA, TLS and UDP. The Zigbee IP standard extends IEEE  establish standards by adding network and security layers and an application framework.

The ZigBee IP standard enables communications over the globally available 2.4 GHz frequency as well as other frequencies such as 920 MHz in Japan.