Bluethooth Wireless Technology

Bluethooth Wireless Technology

Bluetooth wireless technology is an open, accepted standard for wireless communication. It was developed by Dr. Sven Mattisson and Dr. Jaap Haartsen at Ericsson Mobile Communications in Lund, Sweden. Initially Bluetooth was to be used as an interface between mobile phones and their accessories. It soon became clear that the uses for this new wireless technology were manifold and Ericsson decided to share their technology, offer free licenses to any company that adopted the new technology, and brought together an ideal group to promote this technology. This association, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, or SIG chose the following as it’s Mission Statement: The Bluetooth SIG will support a collaborative environment and drive programs to develop and advance Bluetooth wireless technology in order to exceed personal connectivity expectations and meet the needs of a changing world.

During the formative stage of the Trade Association a code name was needed to name the effort. During a discussion of European history and the future of wireless technology, the name of a 10th century Danish king, Harald Blatand (or Bluetooth, in English) came up. He had been instrumental in uniting warring factions in parts of what is now Norway, Sweden and Denmark, just as the technology is designed to allow collaboration between differing industries such as the computing, mobile phone and automotive markets. The code name stuck.

Bluetooth wireless technology works in an open frequency spectrum at 2.4 to 2.8 gigahertz, the same as wireless networks, telephones and other electronic equipment. It is possible for all types of equipment to operate within the same spectrum without disrupting each other because a frequency consists of several channels which the equipment can “hop” between and, in that way, find channels which are quiet. With the Bluetooth 1.2 standard, electronic equipment can find quiet channels beforehand, communicate between them and resend data if anything is lost due to noise. Today’s Bluetooth signals have a strength of max. 2.5 milliwatts and a range of approx. 10 metres (Class 3 equipment). The weak signal means that there must not be too many or large physical obstacles between the Bluetooth devices that are communicating. A key advantage of the weak signal of Bluetooth equipment is that the electromagnetic radiation emitted by all electronic equipment is very weak. In fact, the strength is approx. 1/800 of that emitted by a mobile phone.

The technical specifications for Bluetooth include:

• Range of 10 meters (Class 3), 20 meters (Class 2), and 100 meters (Class 1)

• A bandwidth of 1 MB per second

• Transmits via an omnidirectional radio signal in the 2.4 - 2.8 Ghz range

• Capable of transferring voice

• Low power consumption

• Bluetooth Protocol Stack allowing programmed control of Bluethooth devices

• Bluetooth Profiles which define functionality and may be implemented in programming languages such as Java and C++

• Network ability between Bluetooth devices, defined as a PAN or Personal Area Network. Bluetooth PANs can be piconets (one master and several slaves) or scatternets (two or more masters and several slaves)

Bluetooth security is like all other computer security, it must be used to be effective. An exploit, commonly called Bluejacking, is used by the unscrupulous to hack into people’s cell phones, PDAs and other devices transmitting / receiving Bluetooth or connected