A New Era of Connectivity for Bluetooth


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ABSTRACT

The seemingly endless entanglement of data wires connecting today’s electronic devices has become slightly less jumbled with the introduction of Bluetooth technology and the creation of a wireless data link. This article delves into the implementation and architecture of Bluetooth. It also describes the functional overview and applications of Bluetooth.

INTRODUCTION

Bluetooth is a method for data communication that uses short-range radio links to replace cables between computers and their connected units. Bluetooth is a radio frequency technology utilizing the unlicensed 2.5GHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band. Bluetooth is an open standard for wireless connectivity with supporters mostly from the PC and cell phone industries. Not surprisingly, its primary market is for data and voice transfer between communication devices and PCs.

WHY BLUETOOTH?

Bluetooth attempts to provide significant advantages over other data transfer technologies such as IrDA and HomeRF. IrDA is already popular in PC to peripherals,but is severely limited by the short connection distance of 1m and the line of sight requirement for communication.

Bluetooth packet format:

Since Bluetooth is meant to be compatible with many different applications, it must be able to send data with different protocols quickly and efficiently. When data is transmitted at the lowest level, it is first broken down into smaller packets and sent serially with the least significant bit sent first. Each data packet (represented in Figure 2) contains three fields: an access code, a header, and a payload.

GENERAL BLUETOOTH ARCHITECHTURE

Facilitating this data transmission is a series of protocols within the Bluetooth system that processes the data for suitable transmission and receipt.
The general structure of a Bluetooth system consists of a microprocessor that handles all the baseband specifications, and several software layers that structure the data so that it may be sent properly over a Bluetooth link. Figure 5 provides a good representation of the architecture.

CONCLUSION

With its relatively low implementation costs, Bluetooth technology seems destined to dominate the electronic landscape, as humans worldwide will be able to form personal area networks with devices and completely simplify the way in which they interact with electronic tools and each other.