Wireless image transfer

Recently, most wireless communication standards focused on high speed, long range and have been applied successfully for cellular and local area data networks. The ZigBee Alliance (www.zigbee.org) is a consortium of over 90 companies that is developing a wireless network standard for commercial and residential control and automation applications. The Alliance has recently released its specifications for a low data rate wireless network. The design goals for the network have been driven by the need for machineto-machine communication of small simple control packet and sensor data, and a desire to keep the cost of wireless transceivers to a minimum. Additionally, the network possesses self-organizing capability so that little or no network setup is required. Ideally, individual nodes should be battery powered with a long lifetime and should cost very little. ZigBee technology is a low data rate, low power consumption and low cost, wireless networking [1]. The ZigBee application profile includes home automation, industrial plant monitoring, commercial building automation, automatic meter reading, telecom services/m-commerce, wireless sensor networks, personal home and hospital care and so on [2-3]. ZigBee network is supported 3 types of topologies such as star topology, peer-to-peer topology and cluster tree[2-3]. In the star network, the coordinator node is used to form networks and control all devices in the network. End device nodes communicate with each other through a coordinator node. A cluster tree network is multi star networks organized by coordinator. Coordinator is responsible for starting the network and for choosing certain key network parameter. End device nodes not only communicate with coordinator but also communicate with every router node. However the router nodes processing a routing function cannot directly communicate with each other node, they can only communicate with coordinator. A mesh network is a high reliability network. The router in mesh network is not only processes a routing function but also communicate with other node. ZigBee network has small protocol that is a limitation of the network. Hence, the network is not suitable for transmiting huge data, e.g. data, audio data, video data, etc., because a transmitting time is quite long at any rate depending on the amount of data. In this paper, a performance evaluation of image transmission over ZigBee networks had been investigated to solve the limitation of ZigBee transmission capability.