Mapping of Services on Bluetooth Radio Networks

With the emergence of many short range wireless connectivity solutions it is expected that a wide range of devices will become connected together to form a sea of networked devices. Such an environment has considerable potential for service provision and Bluetooth has been specifically designed for operation in such an environment. However networks of this type must be equipped with the means to find and configure both resources and services when both are in a changing environment. Device and service discovery technologies are thus very important for successfully networking diverse services on ad hoc networks. Bluetooth is limited in this regard but such functionality is provided by Jini, which is a proprietary distributed computing solution offering “network plug and play” features. This paper examines the main issues to be addressed when systems such as Bluetooth and Jini are combined, and describes scenarios which have been built into a developing testbed facility designed primarily to investigate middleware functionality in ad-hoc radio network environments. 1 BLUETOOTH SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE Bluetooth[1] is a technology specification for small form factor, low-cost, short range radio links between mobile PCs, mobile phones and other portable devices. Bluetooth technology allows for the replacement of the many proprietary cables that connect one device to another by a short-range radio link. It is designed to operate in radio environment with a high level of interference and uses a fast acknowledgement and frequency hoping scheme to make the link robust. Bluetooth operates in the unlicensed Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) band, which is centred around 2.45 GHz. The Bluetooth system supports both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections. Several Piconets [3] can be established and linked together in an ad-hoc fashion in which each Piconet is identified by a different