Developing Practical Wireless Applications

the more omnipresent wireless equivalent. Take a closer look at your cellular phone

and your notebook computer: Infrared-enabled? Again, take a closer look at your cel-

lular phone and your notebook computer: Bluetooth- or WiFi-enabled? If you place

two Infrared-enabled notebooks unassumingly beside each other you will become

bemused as you begin to hear “whooshing” and “whirring” sounds along with an

impromptu notification on your Windows taskbar informing you that you can

now connect to your colleague’s computer and transfer files. Similarly, placing your

Infrared-enabled cellular phone alongside your computer would unassumingly insti-

gate communication whilst in line-of-sight. This ability and sheer simplicity conveys

a degree of confidence that has been unmatched by any other wireless technology

to date (with the undeniable exception of the cellular market). A clear notification

of intent to transfer files or any other information is visibly made clear to the user

and, moreover, the impromptu notification allows the user to review any potential

transactions. In Chapter 14, we discuss a similar notion of enabling communication

between two devices.

But, does line-of-sight really matter? No. However, the founding premise of

Bluetooth is that you no longer need to point at a device to make it do something.

Bluetooth wireless technology has a lot to live up to: as we have already discussed and

highlighted there is a certain element of success within the cellular industry. Moreover,

Bluetooth now needs to encompass a wider market and maintain the offer of simplic-

ity for it to succeed.

The Odd Couple: Bluetooth and Ultra-Wideband

But what is to be made of the newly formed alliance between Bluetooth wireless tech-

nology and UWB? Perhaps it’s a case of “keep your friends close, but keep your ene-

mies closer?” It is clearly evident that UWB offers higher data rates and establishes a

more reliable data connection due to its multipath and wide bandwidth techniques

(we discuss UWB in Chapter 15, Ultra-Wideband: Introducing a New Short-Range

Wireless Medium). In many presentations of the UWB technology many have argued

that Bluetooth and UWB are competitors. Similarly, on these occasions we may have

become privy to numerous use cases illustrating how it would be possible for UWB to

succeed where Bluetooth fails; some reports even dare to suggest that Bluetooth is

dead. It really is too dark out there to see who is holding the hammer in a final attempt

to drive in that last nail!

Nevertheless, it seems that, with a degree of predictability, following various

announcements made by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) and press agencies,

industry commentators have unconditionally welcomed the extensible possibilities

Bluetooth: A Cable Replacement Technology 139

Chapter 11