BLUETOOTH TECHNOLOGY

AUTHORS:
1. P. PRASANTHI ………II EEE
2. D. MADHAVI ………II EEE

E-mail : prakasamengineeringcollege@yahoo.co.in

Contact No: 9885308961

08598- 222288

PRAKASAM ENGINEERING COLLEGE

KANDUKUR-523 105.
 BLUETOOTH TECHNOLOGY

ABSTRACT

Continuous need for replacing the cables and deployment of mobile devices in industry
leads to active research in utilization wireless networks. The wireless connection should meet the
reliability needs of the wired systems and serve the processes in real-time. Main topic of this work
is to discuss the convenience and applicability of Wireless LAN and Bluetooth networks for
industrial control purposes, whether the demands of confidence and real-time control can be
equally satisfied.This paper describes industrial real-time control application using wireless IP-
based network. The simulated model rather than the real system was chosen for acquiring more
reliable results and depressing the process disturbances in the control loop. The measurements of
the system consist of controlling algorithm and program intercepting the response delay in
communication between two nodes. The devices allowing the wireless transmission (Wireless
LAN, Bluetooth) instead of cables were integrated. First measurements were done using the
Wireless LAN system configuration, the Bluetooth setup was used in the second part - two sets of
comparable results were obtained. The measurement conditions and the problems encountered
during the research are concluded in the end of the article. The results can give a hint about the
implementation and use of wireless technologies in the industry fields.
INTRODUCTION:
Improvements in the technology and changes in the rhythm of life drive ahead the needs and
possibilities to develop personal location-aware services. Bringing location-awareness as one
property of the service makes it possible to increase the obtained value for the user. Guidance is a
good example of services where the knowledge about user's location is necessary and the use of it
increases the accuracy of the given information and expands possibilities to include secondary
services in the same system . Short range wireless communication technologies make it possible to
offer services like guidance systems with reasonable cost. The value of these services is noticed
but the implementations are still scarce. There are only few suitable systems for indoor guidance in
the markets and most of the available solutions support only WLAN technology that is not very
widely used in mobile terminals, e.g. mobile phones. The location-aware applications have been
discussed and researched for a long time already.

The different techniques have been introduced for the implementations of

location-aware systems on many different fields. On the indoor guidance systems the short range
radio systems have shown their pros (and cons) which can be seen on the situation in the markets.
The systems using Bluetooth or WLAN connections are the most common for the low cost
implementations on that area.

Ekahau Inc. is one of the companies that has already a product for offering location information.
They have introduced the product named Ekahau Positioning Engine (EPE) . EPE uses the WLAN
technology to provide and gather location information from the network. This system is capable to
offer really accurate information about the user location, but for locating process it requires the
WLAN interface for each located mobile terminal. Mobile phones, which are still the most
common mobile terminals, have usually only a Bluetooth interface integrated so the WLAN
network isn't usable for them. Therefore EPE is not usable with them. Another interesting project
to take advantage of the location information produced by the short range radio technology is
PLIM project of Telematica Institute in the Netherlands. They have produced an implementation
of a location-aware instant messaging system by using Bluetooth technology. Implementation uses
same basic idea than our guidance system. The problem in PLIM is the long delay when changing
access point due the way used to decide closest access point to use.

This paper reveals some of the problems of using Bluetooth technology in real time
systems and introduces one possible solution with its implementation to bypass these problems.
Troubles are caused by the time that connection establishment between two devices takes. Its
duration is hard to predict because the time taken to find surrounding Bluetooth devices by using
Bluetooth inquiry can vary a lot. During the inquiry process the unique Bluetooth device addresses
of surrounding devices are found out. The connection to the desired destination is formed by using
one of those found addresses. In the Bluetooth systems the connection process itself is fast and
usually causes no problem. The idea of the implemented Bluetooth guidance system is to skip the
whole inquiry process or at least minimize its effect when forming connection between devices.
The system is designed so that the first thing to do when starting a new guidance process is to send
a registration message. When the registration message is sent to the access point the Bluetooth
device address of the sending device is delivered within headers of the transferred data. By using
the collected information it is possible to inform other access points of the system so that they can
form a new connection to the incoming device without making an inquiry first. The easiest way to
share information between access points is to use the fixed network because in most cases these
access points are used to share fixed network access to wireless devices so that connection is
already available

History:
Bluetooths namesake is that of a Viking King who united many of the Scandinavian
countries peacefully. So his name seems very appropriate for the original idea to link the two
worlds of computers and phones. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) was founded in
1998. Composed of industry heavyweights as IBM, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel and Toshiba. Officially
announced in May of the same year, Bluetooth has since garnered much interest, acclaim and
derision in equal measure. Launched to much fanfare on July 1st 1999, the primary goal of the 1.0
implementation of Bluetooth was to eliminate the wires which litter the floors of offices and homes
everywhere. Despite the opportunities offered by a fast and secure implementation, many industry
pundits believe that it is the promise of a wireless office, which will be the real killer app for
Bluetooth. The creatively entitled successor to 1.0, 1.1, was released in September 2000.
Comprising extensive advantages over the 1st generation of Bluetooth, significant problems exist
in its inability to reliably communicate with a 1.0 device

The Bluetooth Technology Specification:

 A technology that heralded itself as a universal communicator must be happy
working in any territory. A Bluetooth device purchased in Europe should be equally at home
operating in, say, Japan or the US.

Frequency Range:

For this reason, Bluetooth devices utilize the 2.4Ghz Industrial, Scientific, and
Medical (ISM) frequency range. Throughout most of the world this band is free and unregulated.
Notable exceptions include Japan, France and Spain where the bandwidth is reduced. Encouraged
by the Bluetooth SIG, governments world-wide are now beginning to regulate the 2.4Ghz band,
thus ensuring that it will remain available for unhindered use by Bluetooth appliances.

Physical Layer:
The Bluetooth hardware is comprised of a single 9*9mm chip. Inserted into any
device it can communicate with any other Bluetooth device within a 10m radius, or up to 100m if
an amplifier is used. The maximum data rate achievable by 1st generation technology is 1Mbps.
Bluetooth appliances use Gaussian Frequency Shift Keying (GSSK) for radio frequency
modulation. Judicious use of these modulation techniques should allow future generations to
achieve a transfer rate of between 2 and 12Mbps.

Noise Immunity:
Bluetooth was designed to operate in a noisy environment. Two powerful
techniques equip it well for this purpose. Frequency Hop (FH) spread spectrum is a method which
effectively divides the frequency band into a number of hop channels. A technology that quickly
hops channels minimizes potential interference.

Bluetooth takes advantage of this technique by incorporating a fast frequency hopping technology
with a nominal hopping rate of 1600 hops/second among 79 channels. After transmitting a packet
each device hops to another frequency as determined by the master. The hopping sequence is
unique to each piconet and determined by the Bluetooth Device Address (BDA) of the piconet
master. Frequency hopping provides low-level transmission security that renders eavesdropping
almost impossible. It is in fact the frequency hopping technique, which prevents the E0 encryption
scheme from being cracked.

Error Control:
 Another method by which Bluetooth increases its noise immunity is that of Forward
Error Correction (FEC). FEC is a method that enables a receiver to not only detect but also correct
errors in a transmission. This technique is especially valuable in limiting the impact of noise on
long distance links. Three error correction techniques have been so far defined in the Bluetooth
specification: 1/3 Rate FEC, 2/3 Rate FEC, Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ). Although
successful in reducing the number of retransmissions, the overhead incurred by using FEC
significantly slows down transmissions and is therefore not used in relatively noise free
environments. ARQ incurs fewer overheads than FEC, but is correspondingly less effective,
lacking any ability to correct errors.

DataTransmission:
Bluetooth allows for data to be transmitted either synchronously or

asynchronously. The Synchronous Connection Oriented (SCO) method is used primarily for voice
while the Asynchronous Connectionless (ACL) method is used for data. Since SCO packets need
smooth transmission, they are transmitted via reserved intervals, i.e. packets sent in groups with no
interrupts. Bluetooth’s implementation of both SCO and ACL is roughly TCP/IP compatible and it
may thus be well suited to traditional networking. Bluetooth’s base band protocol is a combination
of circuit and packet switching. It supports one ACL channel, up to three simultaneous SCO
channels, or a combination of the two using one SCO and one ACL channel. Time-Division
Duplex (TDD) technology allows for full duplex transmission. Both SCO and ACL make use of
TDD and both support 16 different types of packets, four of which are control packets and are the
same in each type.
 Power:
Bluetooth is truly admirable for its sparing use of power. The technology limits the
Transmitter’s power output to exactly that needed - the signal strength is dynamically
modified to suit the required range. By way of comparison a Bluetooth device uses a little
less than 3% of the power typically used by mobile phones. Device can operate up to
1mW, optional power amp can take this to 100mW, and whole lot takes between 8mA to
30mA at 2.7 volts.

Security:

We will first look at the generic security levels and features that have been
incorporated in the Bluetooth specifications. We shall then see how the Bluetooth Architecture
supports these features.

Bluetooth Security Features:

The Bluetooth specification includes security features at the link level. It supports
authentication (unidirectional or mutual) and encryption. These features are based on a secret link
key that is shared by a pair of devices. To generate this key a pairing procedure is used when the
two devices communicate for the first time. Bluetooth devices transmit on the heavily used
unlicensed 2.45GHz radio band (the same used by microwaves). To keep transmissions from
breaking up, Bluetooth employs frequency hopping, a practice of skipping around the radio band
1600 times each second. This improves clarity and also reduces what Bluetooth proponents call
"casual eavesdropping" by allowing only synchronized devices to be able to communicate. Each
Bluetooth device has a unique address, allowing users to have some trust in the person at the other
end of the transmission. Once this ID is associated with a person, by tracking the unscrambled
address sent with each message, individuals can be traced and their activities easily logged. For
Bluetooth devices to communicate, an initialization process uses a PIN. While some devices allow
users to punch in an ID number, the PIN can also be stored in the non-volatile memory of the
device.

Bluetooth enabled devices can operate in one of three different security modes as per the Bluetooth
specifications:

Security Mode 1- This is the most insecure security mode in which the Bluetooth device does not
initiate any security procedure. It is in a "promiscuous" or "discovery" mode, allowing other
Bluetooth devices to initiate connections with it.

Security Mode 2- This mode enforces security after establishment of the link between the devices
at the L2CAP level. This mode allows the setting up of flexible security policies involving
application layer controls running in parallel with the lower protocols.

Security Mode 3- This mode enforces security controls such as authentication and encryption at
the Baseband level itself, before the connection is set up. The security manager (explained later in
this article) usually enforces this onto the LMP. Bluetooth allows security levels to be defined for
both devices and services. Bluetooth core protocols can only authenticate devices and not users.

Security Manager:
The Security features and policies that can be supported by Bluetooth as mentioned
above are enabled by a component called the security manager. The security manager component
is the entity that decides what policies are to be enforced when a connection request is made (both
for inbound and outbound connections). Based on the service, device type and whether the device
is trusted or untrusted the security manager can enforce application level authentication, encryption
of the session and any other specific access policies.

Potential weaknesses:
The Bluetooth Security Architecture, though relatively secure, is not without its
share of weaknesses. There are a number of weaknesses in the architecture (both directly and
indirectly) that can be potentially exploited. A simple example, though not so simple to implement
in practice is the man-in-the-middle attack for stealing identification and encryption keys before
the start of a session and using the same to impersonate and/or eavesdrop on communications. This
problem is however not specific to Bluetooth. Most key exchange systems are prone to this type of
attack. One way to mitigate this would be to build in support for digital certificate based
authentication systems. Another way might be to make it very difficult for an attacker to lock onto
the frequency used for communication. Making the frequency hopping intervals and patterns
reasonably unpredictable may help to prevent an attacker from locking onto the device signal.
These considerations have been factored in to some degree in the Bluetooth specifications. The
other issue deals with the PIN itself. Most devices have extremely short (usually 4 character) PINs.
This is itself is a security weakness, though it is implementation and not specification related.
Short PINs can be searched exhaustively by attackers.

Applications:
Bluetooth’s first main application will undoubtedly be the elimination of the
tangle of cables that litter floors near computers and hi-fis. Yet its potential even in this arena goes
beyond just eradicating clutter. Unreliable connections will no longer be a problem, nor will the
reconfiguration of units when connections are changed. Switches will no longer be necessary.
Bluetooth will provide for a completely computing environment. A present day example which
hints at the technology’s inherent power is the Bluetooth- enabled mobile phone. Provide the caller
with an earpiece and a small microphone that clips onto the caller’s shirt or top and you have an
almost invisible mobile phone.

Bluetooth allows the phone itself to be located anywhere on the body, even in a bag or briefcase,
and as the mobile phone incorporates voice dialling, when the user says ’Call home’, the message
will be transmitted from the mic to the phone. The mobile phone will dial and the call can proceed
as normal, all without the caller ever touching a button. An added benefit of using Bluetooth
enabled devices is that radiation is removed from the cerebral region.

A few other possible applications are as follows:

• Data synchronisation need never again be a problem as your Bluetooth enabled PDA, PC
or laptop all talk to each other and update their respective files to the most recent ones.

• Travelling in a plane, a person may write but not send e-mail. When the plane touches
down the Bluetooth enabled laptop will communicate with the user’s phone and will
automatically send them.
 • Mice and keyboards will identify themselves to the computer without intervention, or
could also be used to command TVs, videos or hi-fis at the touch.

• Use e-mail while your laptop is still in the briefcase! When your laptop receives e-mail,
you’ll get an alert on your mobile phone. You can also browse all incoming e-mails and
read those you select in the mobile phone’s display.

• A travelling businessperson could ask his laptop computer to locate a suitable printer as
soon as he enters a hotel lobby, and send a printout to that printer when it has been found.

• Ad hoc networking: Device with Bluetooth radio can establish connection with another
when in range.

• Bluetooth will start to make an appearance in expensive cars to enable people to make
phone calls while on the move, a shift that the operator expects to significantly drive take-
up of the technology.

None of these scenarios are in anyway unreasonable and should be available at a reasonable price
in the near future. As penetration levels of Bluetooth technology increase we can expect to see
many more beneficial applications. There are already many many consumers clambering for the
kind of performance that Bluetooth offers - it would require some serious unravelling forBluetooth
to be anything but highly successful.

A Still – Born Technology:

A low-bandwidth technology, overly susceptible to noise interference and lacking a

robust security protocol, Bluetooth is a fundamentally flawed technology. There exist many
proponents of this view. Those who deride Bluetooth realise the potential of the concept but view
its implementation as a missed opportunity. As modern communications demand increasingly
higher bandwidth many see it as unforgivable that Bluetooth be incapable of coping with the kind
of bandwidth which would allow the swift transfer of graphic files let alone streaming video.
The Cons:
• One of the strongest arguments against Bluetooth is the almost superficial transport
capacity offered by the 2.4Ghz band. The maximum transfer rate of 1Mbps will rarely be
achieved in realistic environments and the scenario of a Bluetooth device allowing for
video clips to be quickly sent to display screens may remain indefinitely.

• The 2.4Ghz radiation freely propagates through the atmosphere and dielectric materials.
The cross-talk caused by multiple devices talking to each other will cause tangible
interference and possibly serious problems especially for data transfer.

• The freely propagating signals can be intercepted far beyond this frequency with the right
equipment - parabolic antenna or amplifier. Bluetooth does not offer secure
communication for dealing with confidential information.

The Pros:
• Bluetooth was conceived as a WPAN (Wireless Personal Area Network), not a WLAN. As
such, it offers a low profile, low cost, low power consumption wireless link. It was never
intended as a replacement for LANs and so high data transfer rates were never a priority.

• True, there are many security issues relating to Bluetooth, yet this will remain a fairly
trivial issue for some time. Until Bluetooth becomes widely used in the business arena its
security issues remain fairly trivial - if only because the effort necessary to successfully
intercept and decode a transmission would be far greater than the likely return. More robust
security protocols are in development and will be available with later releases of Bluetooth
devices.

To appreciate Bluetooth and be an impartial judge of this technology, one first has to
realise what Bluetooth is, and what Bluetooth was never designed to be. Most fundamentally
Bluetooth is not a wireless LAN. Although its origins lie there, it was never meant to be considered
a competitor to IEEE 802.11. Viewed as a wireless LAN Bluetooth is indeed an inferior
technology, but taken as it is, Bluetooth is a competent technology offering unparalleled
convenience. Let’s end this paper with an inspiring news. It is reported by BBC in Jan. 2003 that
‘A report out this week shows that Bluetooth, the short-range radio system, experienced dramatic
growth over the last 12 months…Once the final figures are collected, market research firm In-
Stat/MDR expects Bluetooth chip shipments to be up 250% on 2001’.

‘Much of this growth is due to the fact that the short-range radio system is becoming a standard
addition to many mobile phones, laptops and other gadgets.’

Conclusion:
Even though there are many advantages and so the implimentation of the bluetooth
technology will give us good results.Continuous need for replacing the cables and deployment of
mobile devices in industry leads to active research in utilization wireless networks. The wireless
connection should meet the reliability needs of the wired systems and serve the processes in real
time. The simulated model rather than the real system was chosen for acquiring more reliable
results and depressing the process disturbances in the control loop. The measurements of the
system consist of controlling algorithm and program intercepting the response delay in
communication between two nodes. The devices allowing the wireless transmission (Wireless
LAN, Bluetooth) instead of cables were integrated. . The measurement conditions and the
problems encountered during the research are concluded in the end of the article. The results can
give a hint about the implementation and use of wireless technologies in the industry fields.

REFERENCE:
[1] C. -K. ToH, ‘Ad Hoc Mobile Wireless Networks: Protocols and Systems’, Prentice Hall

PTR, 1st edition, 2001.

[2] http://uk.geocities.com/Bluetootharticle/history.html

[3] http://uk.geocities.com/Bluetootharticle/technology.html

[4] http://www.intel.com/technology/itj/q22000/articles/art_1.htm)

[5] http://opensource.nus.edu.sg/projects/Bluetooth/others/IQWiM99_reprint.

[6] http://www.sans.org/rr/wireless/Bluetooth.php

[7] http://uk.geocities.com/Bluetootharticle/applications.html