Rapid progress in power-saving microcontrollers and radio transceivers that has taken place in the recent years has made mass deployments of wireless sensors and actuators economically feasible. The cost of components and production per node has plunged; the setup and maintenance costs are ways lower because no cabling is required. These developments have the potential for bridging the long existing gap between the virtual computer world and the real world. Complemented with hundreds of sensors (of light, heat, motion) and being able to control multiple physical objects (like lights, heating, ventilation) computer networks can become real nerve systems of a building or an enterprise. This property is central for the M2M concept.

The most significant standardization efforts in the area so far has been IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee standards, the latter building upon the lower network layers provided by the former. A number of vendors have sold several million transceivers and systems-on-a-chip implementing the IEEE 802.15.4 standard in hardware. Major players like Samsung, Philips, Siemens, and Mitsubishi Electric are members of the ZigBee Alliance, and more than a dozen of software plus hardware platforms have been already certified for ZigBee compliance.

The ZigBee Alliance considers the following market segments to have the greatest potential for rapid uptake of the standard:

• Building automation
• Home automation including "smart home"
• Industrial automation.

• They normally span across multiple rooms or even buildings. Connecting them all with low-power 2.4 GHz radio links only may be impractical or impossible.
• The organization deploying such a network certainly has its own IT infrastructure. It needs a convenient way of feeding the data from the sensors into its databases or SCADA, controlling the lighting, ventilation, or some production process from employees' workstations, etc.
• Such networks require reliable centralized management.

When the abovementioned requirements are met, deployment of a wireless monitoring and control network has a number of well-known advantages compared to their wired analogues. The installation and maintenance costs are significantly lower; the sensors and actuators can be freely moved across the building without re-wiring; new devices can be incrementally added to the network without disruption; etc.