Control commercially available zigbee switches and devices through the Xbee

Because the light link specifications haven been released yet, except for members of ZigBee alliance I don't think you will be able to at this moment. Unless you want to become a member of the Zigbee alliance. I have had contact with one of their developers who said that modules that where able to use previous specifications should also be able to use the new light link specifications.

For now I think this is all I can give you just because there isn't any more information about it. When I receive more information from the developer I shall update my answer.

Edit:

I got some more information from one of the developers. About the XBee modules from Digi International this is what information he gave me:

• If you go with any of the Pro variants, you will have the ZigBee Pro stack all taken care of in the module. Yet you will still need some other processing element in the system to (a) implement the ZigBee Light Link Application framework (along with other application functionality you need) and (b) interface with the Pro stack in the module.

• If you go with the "programmable variant", that one will give you a secondary processor in the module with 32 KB of Flash and an 8-bit microcontroller. The Microcontroller would have sufficient power to run the Light Link requirements an the 32 KB should give you just about enough for the light Link framework. Note that depending on your application requirements (above light link), this secondary mcirocontroller might not have enough left over memory to support that.

• If you were planning to have a processor of some kind in your system anyway (for other purposes), it might be more cost efficient to go with one of the PRO variants and place Light Link app framework and your application on this processor.

I hope this makes it even more clear for you.

Edit:

I got some more information this time not from a developer from Zigbee but from the support of Atmel, you really need to be careful with what processor/controller you pick. Apperently it needs quite some memory power. Atmel only suggests to get: ATmega128RFA1 or the ATmega256RFR2. It is also already possible to get some Zigbee Light Link stacks from Atmel. You can get those over here: http://www.atmel.com/tools/bitcloudprofilesuite-zigbeepropublicprofile.aspx.

Edit 2:

I got some information that I can't 100% confirm yet, but there is a chance that it will not be able to use the XBee modules just because for a far as I know they are not able to send inter pan frames. These frames are necessary for the commissioning part of Zigbee Light Link. When I get more information that confirms this or not I shall edit again.

Edit 3:

The last information got confirmed for the time being the XBee modules wont be able to be used for Zigbee Light Link. The reason for this is that the current firmware doesn't support inter pan commands. It is how ever possible if you would write your own firmware but the source code of the current one is available. They might also implement these inter pan commands in the future, especially since they are needed for light link.

The rule of thumb a lot of people use is that lower frequencies will have better "penetration" than higher frequencies. That's true in some cases, but not all. This is probably derived from calculating skin depth of materials. The skin depth is just how deeply into a material an electromagnetic wave of a particular frequency can penetrate. The equation used when the material is a good conductor is:

$$ \delta = \sqrt{\frac{2\rho}{\omega\mu}}\ $$

where ρ is the resistivity and μ is the permeability of the material. What you should notice though, is that as frequency (\$\omega\$) gets bigger, the skin depth gets shallower. Here's a practical example of what that means: your microwave shoots out radio waves at 2.4 GHz. If you put a giant thick steak in there, and we measure it's resistivity and permeability, we can calculate the maximum thickness of steak you can cook in your microwave. Anything deeper than the skin depth won't get cooked, because all of the energy of the microwave will have been absorbed already.

There are charts like you mentioned about how well different materials absorb radio waves, but they're not linear or predictable, so there isn't really a rule of thumb that's easy to apply. Here's how well every element in the period table absorbs photons (electromagnetic radiation). The energy on the Y axis is proportional to the frequency:

But this chart of Iron's absorption (according to different mechanisms) shows how things get messier when you zoom in:

But in your application, there's another factor at play, which probably has a bigger effect. When your transmitter starts going in your big facility, it sends off an electromagnetic wave in all directions (assuming you're not using a directional antenna). Those waves will travel through the air until they encounter another medium, like the metal in the containers. When the wave hits that container, some of the energy is absorbed into the container, and some is reflected off the container. The part that's reflected will travel until it hits something else and then some will be absorbed and some will get reflected again. This is called multipath. Your receiving antenna might get a bunch of copies of the originally transmitted signal, all slightly time delayed. Here's an example of what it looks like when an analog TV is suffering from multipath problems:

Because multipath effects can cause waves to destructively interfere with each other, that's probably why you're getting conflicting results. The position of the antenna and transmitter and containers will change the performance a lot, and if things are moving around in the facility, you may get a great signal one moment and then all of a sudden it will be terrible.

Dealing with multipath is hard, but here are a couple things you can try. Make the receive antenna directional, so it will hopefully have a low sensitivity to reflected signals. If you can get the antennas high up above the containers, that may help too. I would experiment with a 433 MHz transmitter (there are a bunch of companies that make modules) because I think you'll get better performance versus 2.4 GHz or 5.8 GHz.