Viconics VWZS Integration Guide - Manual (Page 7)

7
Basic Initial Design and Deployment Consideration
IMPORTANT: It is HIGHLY recommended that you do a proper field survey with the Viconics survey tools to
establish connectivity limitations and architecture layout on ALL job sites considered for deployment with the
Viconics wireless controller products. Please refer to the following manual for the survey procedures and tool
usage: MAN VWG-SURVEY-Exx.
Please note that the following is well covered in the field survey tool procedure manual. A
quick summary is provided here as a reference.
The Viconics wireless survey tools are intended to verify and validate the deployment and use
of the Viconics wireless controllers on a potential job site.
The survey tool will display a numerical percentage value on the LCD screen which represents
the wireless network ZigBee RSSI dBi value (Receiving Signal Strength Indicator).

Any value from 10 to 100% indicates good ZigBee connectivity.
 Any value below 10% “may” indicate that an extra Router VRP 5000W1000W may
need to be installed.
Knowing and understanding the 6A / 5H rule of ZigBee and how to cover orphan nodes!!!
ZigBee is a standard which is suitable for wireless sensor and controller networks. In ZigBee,
a device / node / controller is said to join a network if it can obtain a ZigBee network address
from a parent device. This ZigBee address is a value which is NOT initially exposed or
available for the integrator to see.
Devices / nodes / controllers can calculate and assign addresses for their surrounding devices
by a distributed address assignment scheme. This assignment is flexible, but it does
somewhat restricts the number of attached devices and the possible depth of the said network
for any given device on the network.
ZigBee supports three kinds of networks type: star, tree, and mesh networks. The ZigBee
coordinator (In our case, this is the Jace with the wireless communication card) is responsible
for initializing, maintaining, and controlling the network.

A star network has a coordinator with devices directly connecting to the coordinator.

A tree and mesh networks, devices can communicate with each other in a multi-hop
fashion.
The network is formed by one ZigBee coordinator and multiple ZigBee routers. A device can
join a network as an end device by the associating with the coordinator or a router.
A ZigBee device / node / controller is said to have successfully joined a network if it can obtain
a ZigBee network address from the main Jace coordinator or any other router devices / nodes
/ controller.
6A stands for a maximum
6 addresses per device / node / controller.