Migration from a legacy wireless technology to ZigBee for a Home Automation market ready system

In the evolving Home Automation (HA) market, several wireless technologies compete for a place in your home. Technology standards such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, 6LowPan, WirelessHART and others offer hardware solutions to HA products manufacturers. The HA industry faces now important choices and unknowns when migrating their legacy HA systems to these new technologies. We migrated - for a Belgium manufacturer - a wireless window shutter control system to a ZigBee HA system. This paper presents the challenges encountered and experiences obtained during product development, manufacturing, and deployment. Migrating an existing HA product to any technology adds several design constraints to the development cycle of a product. Migrating to ZigBee adds more constraints arising from the incompatibility of the ZigBee specification with the HA manufacturer production, deployment, and marketing practices. Together, these constraints are non-trivial and act as a barrier for the widespread adoption of ZigBee as the standard for Home Automation.