TABLE OF CONTENTS After several years of over-promotion, Bluetooth short-range wireless technology has finally made the transition from slideware to hardware. Bluetooth is described in different ways by different interested parties but the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) the organisation that has driven its development since it went public in 1998 gives Bluetooth the following headline description [1]: It works whenever you work, seamlessly connecting all of your mobile devices. Creating unprecedented productivity.
However, moving away from marketing-speak and into the less dramatic language used by engineers:
Bluetooth is a standard for a short-range wireless technology;
the de facto standard from the Bluetooth SIG was converted to an IEEE standard in 2002 [2];
Bluetooth operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) band, which is licence-exempt on a global basis (although a few countries still have some specific local regulations);
Bluetooth uses a fast frequency hopping radio technique, changing its operating frequency 1600 times a second this enables it to carry on working even in areas of high interference, an important point, considering that it has to share its radio spectrum with many other devices, including microwave ovens and wireless local area networks (WLANs);
Bluetooth can support voice and/or data (at rates up to 723 kbit/s);
the Bluetooth specifications define a number of different power classes, with the highest power variant ( Power Class, transmitting up to 100 mW) supporting operating ranges up to about 100 metres. However, most of the devices...
