Wireless networks have been an essential part of communication in our daily life. Targeted at different applications, a variety of wireless networks have emerged. Due to constrained resources for wireless communications, challenges arise but are not fully addressed. Featured by low cost and low power, ZigBee technology has been developed for years. As the ZigBee technology becomes more and more mature, low-cost embedded ZigBee interfaces have been available off the shelf and their sizes are becoming smaller and smaller. It will not be surprising to see the ZigBee interface commonly embedded in mobile devices in the near future. Motivated by this trend, we propose to leverage the ZigBee technology to improve existing wireless networks. In this dissertation, we classify wireless networks into three categories (i.e., infrastructure-based, infrastructure-less and hybrid networks), and investigate each with a representative network. Practical schemes are designed with the major objective of improving resource efficiency for wireless networking through utilizing ZigBee technology. Extensive simulation and experiment results have demonstrated that network performance can be improved significantly in terms of energy efficiency, throughput, packet delivery delay, etc., by adopting our proposed schemes
