By.

Vishal Sathawane

Bluetooth Protocol Stack Description

Bluetooth radio

Bluetooth radio is a transceiver which transmits and receives modulated electrical signals from peer Bluetooth devices. The radio for compatability reasons should have some defined transmitter and receiver characteristics. Baseband is the physical layer of the Bluetooth which manages physical channels and links apart from other services like error correction, data whitening, hop selection and Bluetooth security. ACL is Asynchronous Connection-Less physical link for transmitting data over the physical channels. ACL link provides a packet switched connection between the master and all the active slaves. SCO is Synchronous Connection-Oriented physical link for voice-like information. It is a symmetric, point-to-point link between the master and a specific slave. It behaves like a circuit-switched connection. Link Manager essentially handles link set-up, security and control. It provides services like authentication, encryption control, power control and provides QoS capabilities. It also manages devices in different modes (park, hold, sniff and active). L2CAP is the Logical Link Control and Adaptation Layer protocol. It resides in the data link layer and provides connection-less and connection-oriented data services to upper layer protocols with protocol multiplexing capability, segmentation and reassembly operation and group abstractions. L2CAP permits higher level protocols and applications to transmit and receive L2CAP data packets up to 64 Kb in length. SDP is Service Discovery Protocol for applications to discover which services are available and to determine the characteristics of those available services. RFCOMM is a simple transport protocol, with additional provisions for emulating the 9 circuits of RS-232 (EIATIA-232-E) serial ports over L2CAP protocol. It supports up to 60 simultaneous connections between two Bluetooth devices. TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) provides a reliable connection between devices at the transport layer with IP (Internet Protocol) in the network layer. IP provides protocol multiplexing and connections based on IP addresses. Jini technology provides simple mechanisms which enable devices to plug together to form an impromptu community--a community put together without any planning, installation, or human intervention. Each device provides services that other devices in the community may use. These devices provide their own interfaces, which ensures

Baseband

ACL

SCO

Link Manager

L2CAP

SDP RFCOMM

* TCP/IP

* JINI

reliability and compatibility. JINI works on higher layers while Bluetooth works at much lower layers. There are interesting opportunities to put JINI on top of Bluetooth Protocol.

* WAP

WAP is Wireless Access Protocol is a standard for providing Internet communications and advanced telephony services on digital mobile phones, pagers, personal digital assistants and other wireless terminals. * Not part of Bluetooth protocol

Bluetooth radio is an integral part of a Bluetooth device as it provides an electrical interface for transfer of packets
on a modulated carrier frequency using wireless bearer services (CDMA, GSM, DECT). The radio operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM (Industrial Scientific Medicine) band which requires a very small and efficient antenna (smart antenna), a good RF front end (LNA, Up-converter, down-converter) on chip, power controller, GFSK modulator and a transmit/receive switch for it work as a transceiver. Below we discuss radio architecture in reference to Bluetooth radio modem and controller developed by SiliconWave.Com on two separate chips using high performance siliconon-insulator (SOI) BICMOS process.

Baseband is the physical layer of the Bluetooth which manages physical channels and links apart from other
services like error correction, data whitening, hop selection and Bluetooth security. Baseband lies on top of Bluetooth radio in Bluetooth stack and essentially acts as a link controller and works with link manager for carrying out link level routines like link connection and power control. Baseband also manages asynchronous and synchronous links, handles packets and does paging and inquiry to access and inquire the Bluetooth devices. Baseband transceiver applies a time-division duplex (TDD) scheme. (alternate transmit and receive). Therefore apart from different hopping frequency (frequency division), the time is also slotted. In the normal connection mode, the master shall always start at even numbered slots and slave transmission shall always start at odd numbered slots (though they may continue to transmit regardless of the number of the slot). ACL and SCO links Baseband handles two types of links : SCO (Synchronous Connection-Oriented) and ACL (Asynchronous ConnectionLess) link. The SCO link is a symmetric point-to-point link between a master and a single slave in the piconet. The master maintains the SCO link by using reserved slots at regular intervals (circuit switched type). The SCO link mainly carries voice information. The master can support up to three simultaneous SCO links while slaves can support two or three SCO links. SCO packets are never retransmitted. SCO packets are used for 64 kB/s speech transmission. The ACL link is a point-to-multipoint link between the master and all the slaves participating on the piconet. In the slots not reserved for the SCO links, the master can establish an ACL link on a per-slot basis to any slave, including the slave already engaged in an SCO link (packet switched type). Only a single ACL link can exist. For most ACL packets, packet retransmission is applied.

Link manager and controller

Link Manager is used for managing the security, link set-up and control. It talks to the other link manager to exchange information and control messages through the link controller using some predefined link-level commands. Its support for upper layer protocols is bit hazy but possibly a upper layer interface can be used to execute algorithms for mode managment (park, hold, sniff, active), security managment, QoS managment etc. These algorithms may themselves have some input from the user itself. For example, if the user requests a low power operation (lower range operation in a home or a room), then link manager can negotiate with the other link manager about the power control and both can go into some sort of low power mode according to some pre-set algorithm. Also if the security is not a big issue, a user can decide about the level of security by choosing some reduced security option and therefore inform link manager to go soft on security.

Logical Link And Adaptation Layer

L2CAP provides connection-oriented and connectionless data services to upper layer protocols with protocol multiplexing capability, segmentation and reassembly operation, and group abstractions. L2CAP permits higher level protocols and applications to transmit and receive L2CAP packets up to 64 Kilobytes in length. L2CAP only supports ACL links. L2CAP uses the concept of channels to establish different pathways between different applications on Bluetooth devices. These channels are identified by Channel IDentifiers (CIDs) which represent a logical end point of a connection for each application on a device

By . Vishal Sathawane