The field of the invention relates generally to computers, and more particularly to embodiments of a system and method for enabling a viewable personal area network (PAN) identification (ID) over a wireless personal area network.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15 working group has set wireless personal area network (WPAN) as the standard of the short-distance wireless network, and has four task groups: IEEE 802.15.1 is well known as “BLUETOOTH®”; IEEE 802.15.3 and IEEE 802.15.3a establish protocols for high-rate WPANs; and IEEE 802.15.4, commonly known as ZIGBEE® (hereinafter “ZIGBEE”) communication, establishes protocols for low-rate WPANs, which typically operate at speeds at or below 250 kbps.
Conventionally, ZIGBEE communication is performed in a relatively narrow range. Accordingly it can be used to establish a particular type of PAN that is different from a traditional local area network (LAN) or wide area network (WAN). However, unlike IEEE 802.11 that is a set of standards for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) communication, the 15.4 networks (e.g., ZIGBEE enabled networks) do not have PAN Ids that humans can read and understand. Consequently, such PAN Ids are not “viewable”.
Currently, when an end-device (e.g., a terminal) that is capable of performing ZIGBEE communication is located in an area where it can gain access to one or more ZIGBEE networks, the end-device itself selects and gains access to a particular ZIGBEE network from among multiple ZIGBEE networks. However, unlike 802.11 networks (e.g., WiFi), 802.15.4 networks, such as ZIGBEE, do not enable viewable PAN IDs. ZIGBEE devices are either preconfigured with a non-viewable PAN ID or each ZIGBEE device can discover nearby networks and automatically select a non-viewable PAN ID to join.
In addition, 802.15.4 networks are currently machine-to-machine networks, and thus, traditional 802.15.4 networks are not able to present a PAN ID in viewable form or even enable a user to select a PAN ID from a list of available PAN IDs since user involvement is minimized or even eliminated due to the machine-to-machine nature of conventional 802.15.4 network systems. Thus, when a PAN ID is identified, conventional 802.15.4 network systems automatically render PAN IDs to be non-viewable. Such non-viewable PAN IDs are generally 16 byte hexadecimal identifications. Such hexadecimal ids do not equate to American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), Universal Character Set Transformation Format 8-bit (UTF-8), or any other viewable data format.