Zigbee Based Secured Wireless Data Transmission and Reception

Zigbee based Secured Wireless Data Transmission and Reception

Raghuvamshi Kamineni

IST 7040-Data Communications and Networking

Eugene Kortee

Zigbee based Secured Wireless Data Transmission and Reception

ZigBee is a wireless technology that was introduced to supplement the wireless existing supportive technologies such as the Bluetooth to reduce the related impacts of the wired technologies. This technology was developed as an open global standard mainly to provide transmissions at low costs and networks that consume low power. The standards of the Zigbee technology operate on the IEEE standard IEEE 802.15.4 that defined the physical radio specification. The bandwidths defined for the technology are unlicensed, and they consist of 2.4 GHz, 900 MHz, and the 868 MHz. This technology has the specification of packet based radio protocols. The protocols are defined to have to get the network operations cheap and the devices applied are battery operated. Therefore, the communication is maintained as the batteries last for several years and this guarantee availability of the network.

The features of the Zigbee technology protocol are designed to serve in a harsh environment for both commercial and industrial applications. The protocol is characterized by the capability of;

• Supporting multiple network physical topologies such as the typical mesh networks, point-to-point network, and point-to-multipoint networks
• Low duty cycle that is featured with the power of serving for longer period thus providing long battery life
• Low latency
• Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS)
• Enables the connection of up to almost 65,000 nodes per designed network
• Data security applies the 128-bit AES encryption
• Avoids packet collision through retries and acknowledgements

Data transmission within the Zigbee technology has developed has a mechanism for ensuring that the transfer is secured. The technology uses the key distribution between the nodes within the network to provide secure communication. The key distribution was applied with the aim of introducing cryptography so that it can enable the application of the cryptographic algorithm. Packets carrying the messages enabled the encryption of the messages at the sending device “point” and decrypted at the receiving device “Destination”. The encryption techniques applied are different.

The packets are transmitted by establishing communication between the defined nodes in the network. The key transport is enabled between nodes to allow the transmission of either private or public generated key. The frames are protected whereby the frame management models such as the authentication, association, de-authentication, dissociation, beacons, and probes can be used by the clients. Frames are transmitted in the unencrypted format as they must get understood by the all clients within the wireless network. However, the frame management techniques are applied to enhance the protection to the wireless medium against attacks (Binoy,  VijayKumar & Divya Nair, 2015).

The technology does make sure that the communicating devices are secured by developing a mechanism of device authorization. Device authorization defines the registration of the devices within the established network so that they can be recognized each time the device is logged in the network. This technique plays a very big role in ensuring and enhancing ID verification. This defines the secret of the Zigbee technology that enables the transmission of the data in a secured mode. It begins with ensuring that the communications devices are not are secured before the transmission of the packets is allowed. The security architecture of the Zigbee technology is defined within its standards which establish very comprehensive security architecture along with a trusted management model. The architecture takes to incorporate and ensure mechanisms such as frame encryption, integrity and authentication are applied to each and every layer during the transmission of data.