Bluetooth
It is a Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN) technology and is used for exchanging data
over smaller distances. This technology was invented by Ericson in 1994.
It operates in the unlicensed, industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) band from 2.4 GHz .
Maximum devices that can be connected at the same time are 8(1 Master and 7 Slaves).
Bluetooth ranges up to 10 meters.
It provides data rates up to 1 Mbps or 3 Mbps depending upon the version.
The spreading technique that it uses is FHSS (Frequency-hopping spread spectrum).
A Bluetooth network is called a piconet and a collection of interconnected piconets is
called scatternet.
Bluetooth Architecture:
Piconet: Piconet is a type of Bluetooth network that contains one primary node called the master node
and seven active secondary nodes called slave nodes.
Thus, we can say that there is a total of 8 active nodes which are present at a distance of 10
meters.
The communication between the primary and secondary nodes can be one-to-one or one-to-
many. communication is only between the master and slave.
Slave-slave communication is not possible.
Scatternet: It is formed by using various piconets.
A slave that is present in one piconet can act as master or we can say primary in another
piconet. This kind of node can receive a message from a master in one piconet and deliver the
message to its slave in the other piconet where it is acting as a master. This type of node is
referred to as a bridge node.
Bluetooth Protocol Stack:
1. Radio (RF) layer: It specifies the details of the air interface, including frequency, the use of
frequency hopping and transmit power. It performs modulation/demodulation of the data into RF
signals. It defines the physical characteristics of Bluetooth transceivers. It defines two types of
physical links: connection-less and connection-oriented.
2. Baseband Link layer: The baseband is the digital engine of a Bluetooth system and is
equivalent to the MAC sublayer in LANs. It performs the connection establishment within a
piconet, addressing, packet format, timing and power control.
3. Link Manager protocol layer: It performs the management of the already established links
which includes authentication and encryption processes.
4. Logical Link Control and Adaption (L2CAP) Protocol layer: It is also known as the heart of
the Bluetooth protocol stack. It allows the communication between upper and lower layers of the
Bluetooth protocol stack. It packages the data packets received from upper layers into the form
expected by lower layers. It also performs segmentation and multiplexing.
5. Service Discovery Protocol (SDP) layer: It allows discovering the services available on
another Bluetooth-enabled device.
6. RF comm layer: It provides emulation of serial ports over the logical link control and adaption
protocol(L2CAP).
7. TCS(Telephony Control Protocol): It provides telephony service. The basic function of this
layer is call control (setup & release) and group management for the gateway serving multiple
devices.
8. Application layer: It enables the user to interact with the application.
Advantages:
It is a low-cost and easy-to-use device.
It can also penetrate through walls.
It creates an Ad-hoc connection immediately without any wires.
It is used for voice and data transfer.
Disadvantages:
It can be hacked and hence, less secure.
It has a slow data transfer rate: of 3 Mbps.
It has a small range: 10 meters.
Bluetooth communication does not support routing.
The issues of handoffs have not been addressed.
