Category: bluetooth technology

Bluetooth In Action

In the United States, Bluetooth gets absolutely no
respect. It is however, becoming more and more
common in notebooks, PDAs, and especially cell
phones. Bluetooth will provide wireless users a
way to transmit small amounts of data over short
distances.

Now, Bluetooth is facing stiff competition from
new wireless technology. Referred to as UWB or
Ultra Wideband, it promises data transfer of up
to 480 MB a second – while most current Bluetooth
devices transfer data up to 721 KB a second.

For the time being, Bluetooth devices are surely
cropping up. Below, we will look at some of
the accessories offered with Bluetooth technology.

Talking to the dashboard
When pairing it with a cell phone, the CCM Blue
Warrior car kit becomes a great speaker phone that
plugs into the power adapter of your vehicle. The
noise cancelling microphone will reduce background
noise efficiently, with the large buttons making
adjusting the speaker volume a snap. Although
the Blue Warrior is far from sexy or sleek, it’s
very practical.

Tiny tuning box
Part MP3 player and part hands free phone, the
compact and lightweight Sony HBM-30 is an attractive
gadget that lets you accept calls with minimal
interruption of your tunes. When you get an incoming
call it will automatically pause your music, then
you speak into the built in microphone that you
can wear around your neck or clip to your clothes.

The pen
With Nokia’s SU-1B digital pen, you can doodle and
make hand written notes in ink on a special pad
then transmit them from the pad to your Bluetooth
phone. Being an alternative to typing on a cell
phone keypad, the pen is very handy, although a
pricey tool from MMS fans.

Snapshots
If you want to make slide shows with your camera
photos, the Nokia SU-2 image viewer will let you
disply your pictures on a TV or projector. Simply
hook this square gray device to your TV’s input
with the built in cable, then beam the pictures
to the SU-2 from your Bluetooth enabled phone and
the photo fest will begin.

This device is a snap to set up and use, although
it displays resolutions of up to 640 by 480. If
you have a newer phone that takes high resolution
photos, you won’t be able to use the Nokia SU-2
image viewer.

Keep in mind, the 640 by 480 pixel photos will
appear blocky on TV screens, no matter what you
do. If your phone can send batches of photos, you
can create a slide show – although Nokia claims
you can use sequentially beamed shots as well.

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Bluetooth Basics

The technology of Bluetooth wireless is a short
range communications method intended to replace
the cables that connect portable or fixed devices
while maintaining the highest levels of security.

The key features offered by Bluetooth include
low power and low cost. The specification in
Bluetooth defines a uniform structure for a wide
range of devices to communicate and connect with
one another.

The technology behind Bluetooth has achieved
global satisfaction such as enabled devices, almost
everywhere in the world. Bluetooth devices will
connect and communicate without wires through
short range and networks known as piconets.

Each device will simultaneously communicate with
up to seven other devices within a single piconet,
meaning that each device can also belong to
several piconets simultaneously. The piconets
are dynamically established as Bluetooth enabled
devices enter and leave the proximity of radio.

A fundamental to Bluetooth strength is the
ability to handle both data and voice transmissions
simultaneously. This will enable users to enjoy
varieties of innovative solutions such as hands
free talking, printing and fax capabilities,
and other applications.

Specifications
Unlike other standards of wireless, the Bluetooth
specification gives product developers both a
link layer and application layer definitions,
which will help support data and voice applications.

Spectrum
The Bluetooth technology operates in the industrial
and scientific band at 2.4 to 2.485 GHz, using a
spread spectrum, frequency hopping signal.

Interference
The adaptive frequency hopping of Bluetooth
technology was designed to reduce interference
between wireless technologies that share the 2.4
GHz spectrum. Adaptive frequency hopping (AFH)
works well within the spectrum to take full
advantage of the frequency available.

AFH hopping allows for more efficient transmission
within the spectrum, which provides users with
greater performance even if they are using other
technologies along with Bluetooth.

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The Future Of Bluetooth

Because it meets the basic needs of connectivity in
close range, Bluetooth has a very bright future
ahead of it. Bluetooth is actually the result of
initiatives from nine leading communications and
computer industry giants, including 3-COM, Sony,
Lucent, IBM, Nokia, Microsoft, etc.

Since the forming of the original group, more than
1,800 manufacturers around the world have joined
the initiative. According to reports, the Bluetooth
technology is expected to be built into more than
100 million devices, with over 670 million enabled
Bluetooth devices.

Resulting from the amazing success of WAP (Wireless
Application Protocol), the adoption of smart phones
and hand held devices, Bluetooth can easily have
an amazing impact on your day to day life. Bluetooth
is one of the key technologies that can help to
make the mobile information society happen, by
blurring the possibilities between home, the office,
and the outside world.

The seamless integration and connectivity that
Bluetooth promises will make it possible to explore
a wide range of interactive and highly transparent
personalized services which were actually quite
difficult to dream of simply because of the
complexity involved with making such devices
communicate with each other.

Many Bluetooth pilot products have already been
rolled into the market and backed by big vendors,
which is a healthy sign for the overall acceptance
of the technology. The support for Bluetooth isn’t
limited to companies that develop only Bluetooth
enabled products.

The applications for Bluetooth can have great
impacts on other industries as well. The adoption
of Bluetooth technology is expected to spread
throughout the industry of computers.

Unlike infrared technology, Bluetooth is used by
many different wireless devices. Bluetooth offers
exceptional quality for short range wireless, even
going through walls and obstructions. While
infrared is the biggest competitor at this time,
Bluetooth far surpasses it, proving to millions that
it is the wireless communication technology of the
present day and age.

In the beginning, Bluetooth started with version 1.0,
then gradually moved from there. The current
version is 2.0+EDR, with another version currently
in development. The technology behind the Bluetooth
specification always getting better and better,
which is why it’s so popular.

In the future, you can expect the technology
behind Bluetooth to get better. Bluetooth has
proven to be the wireless standard of the future,
offering you wireless connectability for hundreds
of different devices. For cell phones or other forms
of wireless connections, Bluetooth is the one
technology that you don’t want to find yourself
without.

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How Bluetooth Works

Bluetooth devices will normally operate at 2.4 GHZ
in the license free, globally available ISM radio
band. The advantage to this band includes worldwide
availability and compatibility. A disadvantage to
this however, is that the devices must share this
band with other RF emitters. This includes
automobile security systems, other wireless devices,
and other noise sources, such as microwaves.

To overcome this challenge, Bluetooth employs a
fast frequency hopping scheme and therefore uses
shorter packets than other standards within the
ISM band. This scheme helps to make Bluetooth
communication more robust and more secure.

Frequency hopping
Frequency hopping is basically jumping from frequency
to frequency within the ISM radio band. After a
bluetooth device sends or receives a packet, it
and the device (or devices) it’s communicating with
hop to another frequency before the next packet is
sent. This scheme offers three advantages:
1. Allows Bluetooth devices to use the
entirety of the available ISM band, while never
transmitting from a fixed frequency for more than a
short period of time. This helps insure that
Bluetooth conforms to the ISM restrictions on the
transmission quantity per frequency.
2. Ensures that any interference won’t
last long. Any packet that doesn’t arrive safely
to its destination can be resent to the next
frequency.
3. Provides a base level of security as
it’s very hard for an eavesdropping device to predict
which frequency the Bluetooth devices will use
next.

The connected devices however, must agree upon the
frequency they will use next. The specification
in Bluetooth ensures this in two ways. First, it
defines a master and slave type relationship between
bluetooth devices. Next, it specifies an algorithm
that uses device specific information when
calculating the frequency hop sequences.

A Bluetooth device that operates in master mode can
communicate with up to seven devices that are set in
slave mode. To each of the slaves, the master
Bluetooth device will send its own unique address
and the value of its own internal clock. The
information sent is then used to calculate the
frequency hop sequences.

Because the master device and each of the slave
devices use the same algorithm with the same initial
input, the connected devices will always arrive
together at the next frequency that they have agreed
upon.

As a replacement for cable technology, it’s no
wonder that Bluetooth devices are usually battery
powered, such as wireless mice and battery powered
cell phones. To conserve the power, most devices
operate in low power. This helps to give Bluetooth
devices a range of around 5 – 10 meters.

This range is far enough for wireless communication
but close enough to avoid drawing too much power
from the power source of the device.

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Advantages And Disadvantages

Bluetooth has a lot to offer with an increasingly
difficult market place. Bluetooth helps to bring
with it the promise of freedom from the cables and
simplicity in networking that has yet to be matched
by LAN (Local Area Network).

In the key marketplace, of wireless and handheld
devices, the closest competitor to Bluetooth is
infrared. Infrared holds many key features,
although the line of sight it provides doesn’t go
through walls or through obstacles like that of the
Bluetooth technology.

Unlike infrared, Bluetooth isn’t a line of sight and
it provides ranges of up to 100 meters. Bluetooth
is also low power and low processing with an
overhead protocol. What this means, is that it’s
ideal for integration into small battery powered
devices. To put it short, the applications with
Bluetooth are virtually endless.

Disadvantages
Bluetooth has several positive features and one
would be extremely hard pressed to find downsides
when given the current competition. The only real
downsides are the data rate and security. Infrared
can have data rates of up to 4 MBps, which provides
very fast rates for data transfer, while Bluetooth
only offers 1 MBps.

For this very reason, infrared has yet to be
dispensed with completely and is considered by
many to be the complimentary technology to that
of Bluetooth. Infrared has inherent security due
to its line of sight.

The greater range and radio frequency (RF) of
Bluetooth make it much more open to interception and
attack. For this reason, security is a very key
aspect to the Bluetooth specification.

Although there are very few disadvantages, Bluetooth
still remains the best for short range wireless
technology. Those who have tried it love it, and
they know for a fact that Bluetooth will be
around for years to come.

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