Unwire yourself with Bluetooth Technology

Introduction
The advent of powerful devices with rich computing and communication features the need for ubiquitous and seamless integration has arisen. An average successful individual uses mobile phone for sending and receiving SMS, storing pictures and contact information while having a laptop or computer at home. Needless to talk about the gadgets used by senior and IT professionals. All this has lead to the need to have a limitless and boundless integration of these devices and a common mechanism to do so. The challenge for all this is the capability of doing it in an individualized manner without the involvement of any infrastructure overheads. The answer lies in Bluetooth technology which is named after the 10 th century Danish king Herald Bluetooth, who united Denmark and Norway bringing peace that lasted 25 years . Ericsson, the mobile devices and telecom giant which invented the Bluetooth technology inspired from the Danish king and named this technology after him, which is aimed at uniting the computing and telecommunications world.

Let us try and understand what this technology is all about and how does it work.

About the technology
Bluetooth is an industry standard—an open source specification available for developers to change and enhance—for short-range digital radio. It is designed to operate in the unlicensed radio spectrum known as the Industrial - Scientific - Medical (ISM) band, which is generally available in most parts of the world. Bluetooth allows a variety of devices—not only conventional PCs, laptops, mobile phones and peripherals, but also PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and other next-generation emerging portable devices—to communicate without cables or hard wiring. It is being dubbed as the next generation communication interoperability mechanism which will touch and change the lifestyle of the masses.

A Scatternet with three interconnected piconets in which two are Personal Access Networks (PAN) and one is used to provide network access to the two PANs

A piconet is an ad-hoc computer network of devices using Bluetooth technology protocols to allow one master device to interconnect with up to seven active slave devices (because a three-bit MAC address is used). Up to 255 further slave devices can be inactive, or parked, which the master device can bring into active status at any time. Within a piconet, a Bluetooth unit can play either of two roles: master or slave. Each piconet may only contain one master (and there must always be one) and up to seven active slaves. Any Bluetooth unit can become a master in a piconet. A scatternet is cluster of piconets connected through shared devices.

A Scatternet with three inter-connected piconets. Via a GPRS cellular phone one piconet provides IP network access to the other two piconets

The Bluetooth system provides duplex transmission based on slotted time-division duplex (TDD), where the duration of each slot is 0.625 ms. There is no direct transmission between slaves in a Bluetooth piconet, only from master to slave and vice versa.

Pros and Cons of Bluetooth
The following are on the pros side of Bluetooth

• For the functioning of Bluetooth both the devices involved need to be enabled with the technology abd there is no need of any additional infrastructure. The network therefore is regarded as an ad hoc network

• The communication mechanism is totally cable free which makes it very flexible and easy to us. The technology also does not require line of sight as is the case with Infra Red (IR).

• The specifications are open which allows for innovative ideas to be applied. This fosters a willingness to exploit the possibilities—most of them have yet to be thought of or still to be explored

The following are some of the cons of Bluetooth

Security is one of the concerns that need to be addressed as part of the technology enhancements. Although the challenges and the solutions are also the same as in the case of internet based applications but the ad hoc sense of the application makes it more difficult to implement.
Bluetooth is not to be viewed as a replacement for conventional LANs, although it can, however, provide the final connection to the LAN through Bluetooth ports.
Cost of Bluetooth devices is an issue but will be wiped out with more mass production and enhanced capabilities

Conclusion
Bluetooth technology enables its users to communicate and interact even in situations where the network in the “typical” sense does not exist at the same time provides the comfort of being able to avoid wires in doing so. Integrate, reuse and collaboration of information on different devices as well as in the usage of various related components of a device like the keyboard, mouse etc of the whole unit is another feature which makes life easier and more flexible. It however is not a replacement of the LAN/ WANs and a complementary technology to the same. Security and Cost of individual chips will also decide the fate of its implementation in low cost devices.

About the author
Ishaq Quadri heads the projects delivery team at binary spectrum. Ishaq started his career in 1994, and ever since has delivered software solutions for global clients who are leaders in the segments of Retail, Transportation, Healthcare and Financials domains. He played crucial roles in various capacities ranging from consultant to project manager and solutions architect at CMC Limited, Netkarft (Adea International) and Port of Fujairah UAE . Ishaq is a certified PMP and has been active on the processes front having played the role of Appraisal Team Member (ATM) for SEI CMMI appraisal. His recent works have been on the RFID front in creating a generic framework and has co-authored an article titled ‘Retailer's truth on RFID' published in European CEO magazine in May-June 2005 Edition. He also wrote a white paper on RFID titled ‘Leveraging RFID Technology - A Practical Approach to Business Process Efficiency'


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