NAME

Unison Wireless Services

SYNOPSIS

This page provides an overview of the various wireless services available within Unison OS. It provides further references to quickly find these additional resources along with specific programming information to initialize, configure, and communicate using various wireless radios.

DESCRIPTION

Wireless devices offer various tradeoffs between distance, data rate, cost, services, and reliability. The system designer must choose between various options to meet design goals. Briefly, the best options are given in the following paragraphs.

WiFi or 802.11 protocols are useful over relatively short distances of tens of meters where high bandwidth is required and power is not an issue.

BlueTooth is limited to short distances (30m) and has good data capabilities. It has moderate cost.

802.15.4 offers a relatively longer distance, (1Km) low data rate, low cost alternative. 6loWPAN is one of the options here.

Zigbee works on 802.15.4 radios but offers a higher level protocol. It is more complex and expensive than proprietary 802.15.4 schemes but does offer far more nodes as well.

For wide area services, GPRS (mobile phone system data channel), Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and UHF radios are used. They have a serial interface and generally use similar command modes so that similar software will provide support for them.

See one or more of the following for further details:

SEE ALSO

WiFi, ZigBee, TCP/v6 with 6loWPAN, 802.15.4, BlueTooth, GPRS, UHF, GPS and more

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