Bluetooth

As portable computing devices get smarter and more capable, connectivity frustrations increase.

This is where Bluetooth comes in. The brainchild of Ericsson, IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba, Bluetooth is a microwave high-speed wireless link system that's designed to work with portable equipment. To that end, it's low power, very small and very low cost. It uses the same frequencies as existing radio LANs (and, incidentally, microwave ovens) to create a secure 1 Mbit/s link between devices within 10m of each other. These devices can be laptops, PDAs, cellphones, wired telephone access points, even wristwatch devices, headphones, digital cameras and so on. With them, your notebook PC will be able to access your cellular phone - and thus the Internet - without your having to take the phone out of your pocket. Files can be exchanged and communications set up for voice and data between just about any device capable of handling the information.

Bluetooth operates in the unlicensed SM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band at 2.45GHz, which is globally available for products. There's 89MHz of bandwidth allocated here, and since Bluetooth is very low power, it actually radiates less than most national and international standards allow non-transmitting devices to leak as part of their normal operation. This is key, as it allows the technology to operate without restriction on aircraft.

Ericsson and Nokia developed the RF side of Bluetooth. The link works in a similar way to the IEEE 802.11 wireless networking system, with a packet-switching protocol based on fast-frequency hopping direct sequence spread spectrum. In other words, it constantly switches channel to avoid interference. It changes frequency 1,600 times a second through 79 frequency bands. It's expected that this will be so good at avoiding conflicting signals from other sources that the transmission power can be kept very low.

Security is taken care of through the frequency hopping and 40-bit encryption. As the system uses radio, it can work through some barriers -briefcases, shirt pockets and desktops, for example - but it won't carry through office buildings.

Within the 10m radius of a unit, up to 10 independent full-speed piconets can operate, with bandwidth reduced proportionately if more than this are in use. Each piconet can handle up to eight devices.

Power consumption and cost were very significant factors in Bluetooth's design, and it was decided not to make the system a fully-fledged LAN. As a result, there's no collision detection. All devices on a piconet are synchronized to a master device and are controlled by it to prevent simultaneous operation on the same frequency. Any device can be a master, and is elected dynamically when the link starts up.