A master can also leave its piconet and act as a slave in another piconet.

It is
clearly not possible for a master of one piconet to act as the master of another
piconet as this would lead to identical behavior (both would have the same hopping
sequence, which is determined by the master per denition). As soon as a master
leaves a piconet, all trafc within this piconet is suspended until the master returns.
Communication between different piconets takes place by devices jumping
back and forth between theses nets. If this is done periodically, for instance,
isochronous data streams can be forwarded from one piconet to another.
However, scatternets are not yet supported by all devices.
7.5.2.2 Protocol stack
As Figure 7.44 shows, the Bluetooth specication already comprises many proto-
cols and components. Starting as a simple idea, it now covers over 2,000 pages
dealing with not only the Bluetooth protocols but many adaptation functions
and enhancements. The Bluetooth protocol stack can be divided into a core
specification (Bluetooth, 2001a), which describes the protocols from physical
layer to the data link control together with management functions, and prole
specifications (Bluetooth, 2001b). The latter describes many protocols and
functions needed to adapt the wireless Bluetooth technology to legacy and new
applications (see section 7.5.9).
The core protocols of Bluetooth comprise the following elements:
Radio: Specification of the air interface, i.e., frequencies, modulation, and
transmit power (see section 7.5.3).
Baseband: Description of basic connection establishment, packet formats,
timing, and basic QoS parameters (see section 7.5.4).
Mobile communications 274
S
P
SB
P
SB
P
S
S
M
M = Master
S = Slave
P = Parked
SB = Standby
S
P
S
M
SB
Piconets (each with a capacity of < 1 Mbit/s)
Figure 7.43
Bluetooth scatternet
MCOM_C07.QXD 6/6/03 1:24 pm Page 274
Link manager protocol: Link set-up and management between devices
including security functions and parameter negotiation (see section 7.5.5).
Logical link control and adaptation protocol (L2CAP): Adaptation of
higher layers to the baseband (connectionless and connection-oriented ser-
vices, see section 7.5.6).
Service discovery protocol: Device discovery in close proximity plus
querying of service characteristics (see section 7.5.8).
On top of L2CAP is the cable replacement protocol RFCOMM that emu-
lates a serial line interface following the EIA-232 (formerly RS-232) standards.
This allows for a simple replacement of serial line cables and enables many
legacy applications and protocols to run over Bluetooth. RFCOMM supports mul-
tiple serial ports over a single physical channel. The telephony control protocol
specication binary (TCS BIN) describes a bit-oriented protocol that denes
call control signaling for the establishment of voice and data calls between
Bluetooth devices. It also describes mobility and group management functions.
The host controller interface (HCI) between the baseband and L2CAP pro-
vides a command interface to the baseband controller and link manager, and
access to the hardware status and control registers. The HCI can be seen as the
hardware/software boundary.
Wireless LAN 275
audio apps. vCal/vCard NW apps. telephony apps. mgmnt. apps.
AT modem
commands
TCS BIN SDP
Control
TCP/UDP
IP
PPP/BNEP
OBEX
RFCOMM (serial line interface)
Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP) Audio
Link Manager
Baseband
Radio
AT: attention sequence
OBEX: object exchange
TCS BIN: telephony control protocol specification binary
BNEP: Bluetooth network encapsulation protocol
SDP: service discovery protocol
RFCOMM: radio frequency comm.
Host Controller Interface
Figure 7.44
Bluetooth protocol
stack
MCOM_C07.QXD 6/6/03 1:24 pm Page 275
Many protocols have been adopted in the Bluetooth standard. Classical
Internet applications can still use the standard TCP/IP stack running over PPP or use
the more efficient Bluetooth network encapsulation protocol (BNEP). Telephony
applications can use the AT modem commands as if they were using a standard
modem. Calendar and business card objects (vCalendar/vCard) can be exchanged
using the object exchange protocol (OBEX) as common with IrDA interfaces.
A real difference to other protocol stacks is the support of audio. Audio appli-
cations may directly use the baseband layer after encoding the audio signals.
7.5.3 Radio layer
The radio specication is a rather short document (less than ten pages) and only
denes the carrier frequencies and output power. Several limitations had to be
taken into account when Bluetooths radio layer was designed. Bluetooth
devices will be integrated into typical mobile devices and rely on battery power.
This requires small, low power chips which can be built into handheld devices.
Worldwide operation also requires a frequency which is available worldwide.
The combined use for data and voice transmission has to be reflected in the
design, i.e., Bluetooth has to support multi-media data.
Bluetooth uses the license-free frequency band at 2.4 GHz allowing for
worldwide operation with some minor adaptations to national restrictions. A
frequency-hopping/time-division duplex scheme is used for transmission, with
a fast hopping rate of 1,600 hops per second. The time between two hops is
called a slot, which is an interval of 625 s. Each slot uses a different frequency.
Bluetooth uses 79 hop carriers equally spaced with 1 MHz. After worldwide har-
monization, Bluetooth devices can be used (almost) anywhere.
Bluetooth transceivers use Gaussian FSK for modulation and are available in
three classes:
Power class 1: Maximum power is 100 mW and minimum is 1 mW (typ.
100 m range without obstacles). Power control is mandatory.
Power class 2: Maximum power is 2.5 mW, nominal power is 1 mW, and
minimum power is 0.25 mW (typ. 10 m range without obstacles). Power
control is optional.
Power class 3: Maximum power is 1 mW.
7.5.4 Baseband layer
The functions of the baseband layer are quite complex as it not only performs fre-
quency hopping for interference mitigation and medium access, but also denes
physical links and many packet formats. Figure 7.45 shows several examples of fre-
quency selection during data transmission. Remember that each device participating
in a certain piconet hops at the same time to the same carrier frequency (f
i
in
Figure 7.45). If, for example, the master sends data at f
k
, then a slave may answer at
f
k+1
. This scenario shows another feature of Bluetooth. TDD is used for separation of
the transmission directions. The upper part of Figure 7.45 shows so-called 1-slot
Mobile communications 276
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