Custodians of the Bluetooth standard are a flexible lot, considering the enhancements the popular short-range 2.4 GHz wireless technology has been receiving. The Bluetooth SIG or Special Interest Group has allowed it to evolve in ways not envisioned by the inventors. Their foresight will be allowing this technology to expand beyond three billion shipments beginning next year.
The latest incarnation of the technology is the Bluetooth 5.0. This indicates the seriousness with which SIG wants to entrench Bluetooth as a vital component of the IoT or Internet of Things. By 2025, more than 80 billion connected things will be busy exchanging data across networks wirelessly. According to IDC or the International Data Corporation, Bluetooth will be the governing standard for these networks.
That is understandable, as Bluetooth has its roots in short-range handset communication. It all started in mid 90s at Ericsson, when engineers Sven Mattisson and Jaap Haartsen wanted to get rid of the jumble of wires linking their electronic devices. They devised low-throughput, short-range radio links for exchanging information between handsets, without having to plug in a cable. The Ericsson endeavor turned into an open standard operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band, and several others joined them, including Toshiba, IBM, and Nokia.
Around 1998, the standard was named Bluetooth, after an ancient Scandinavian king. However, performance of Bluetooth 1.0 was below expectations, achieving only 700 kbps under ideal but practical conditions. In addition, manufacturers had their own problems in getting their equipment to interoperate. Subsequent iterations not only added bandwidth but also added 79 1-MHz channels for randomly hopping around to avoid RF interference from other devices on the license-free 2.4 GHz band.
Incorporation into cellphones brought major success to Bluetooth, as the handset started to be center of the personal area networks, linking almost everything electronic to the smartphones. Additions to the firmware stack of Bluetooth optimized its performance to suit specific applications, such as in cars, printers, speakers, and in PCs. By now, Bluetooth was in version 3.0+, with a bandwidth of 3 Mbps. Moreover, by co-locating to an 802.11 channel, Bluetooth was soon competing with Wi-Fi at 24 Mbps.
Bluetooth was able to achieve its biggest breakthrough with version 4.0, also called Bluetooth low energy. This version introduced a second radio using a lightweight stack but interoperable with its elder brother. Now, even compact wireless devices could send a tiny amount of data in a rapid burst, returning to an ultra-low power consumption state of sleep. This mode allowed the devices to operate for long periods from small-capacity batteries.
With Bluetooth 5.0, its low energy part also gets a speed boost to 2 Mbps, which makes things run far more smoothly. Now, IoT sensors can receive over the air updates to keep them protected from hackers. The range has also increased four times. This makes Bluetooth 5.0 viable for the entire house applications such as smart lights, with the throughput dropping to 125 kbps when the range is extended.
To make it competitive to other industrial and smart home networking technologies such as Z-Wave, Zigbee, and Thread, Bluetooth 5.0 now incorporates the Mesh Networking standard.
