Multicast communication in wireless home and building automation: ZigBee and DCMP

With an ever increasing performance, wireless technologies present a more and more attractive alternative to wired media. This is also true for home and building automation (HBA) systems. In HBA, large areas must be covered at low cost. This precludes the use of dedicated network infrastructure. At the same time, the allowable power consumption and thus transmission power of sensors in particular is severely restricted. Hence, efficient peer-to-peer communication schemes are required. Especially for multicast communication, optimized protocols can make a difference. Therefore, this paper shows how DCMP (dynamic core based multicast routing protocol for ad hoc wireless networks) can be used to improve multicast in ZigBee networks.