24-04-2014, 03:18 PM
A Seminar report on Wibree
INTRODUCTION
Now that wireless connections are established solutions in various sectors of consumer electronics, the question arises whether devices that draw long life from a small battery could find benefit as well in a global standard for wireless low energy technology. Makers of sensors for sports, health and fitness devices have dabbled in wireless but not together, while manufacturers of products like watches have never even considered adding wireless functionality because no options were available. Several wireless technologies have tried to address the needs of the button cell battery market, but most were proprietary and garnered little industry support. However, none of these technologies let smaller manufacturers plug in to a global standard that provides a viable link with devices like mobile phones and laptops.
However, companies that wants to make their small devices wireless need to build and sell either a dedicated display unit or an adapter that connects to a computing platform such as a mobile phone, PC or iPod. There have been few successful products that followed this route to a mass market. A new flavor of Bluetooth technology may be just the answer, and a more efficient alternative for yet another wireless standard.
In the ten years since engineers from a handful of companies came together to create the first Bluetooth specification, Bluetooth technology has become a household term, a globally recognized standard for connecting portable devices. The Bluetooth brand ranks among the top ingredient technology brands worldwide, recognized by a majority of consumers around the world. A thriving global industry of close to 11,000 member companies now designs Bluetooth products and works together to develop future generations of the technology, found in well over 50 percent of mobile phones worldwide and with more than two billion devices shipped to date.
SPECIFICATION
Bluetooth low energy technology is a next generation wireless communications specification from the same group that created and continue to expand the original Bluetooth specification to cover new use cases. Bluetooth low energy technology enables new classes of devices that can only be viable when an ultra low power radio technology, interoperable profiles and services are combined together to create an industry wide technology platform. Bluetooth low energy technology connects everything to anything, phones and watches, watches to shoes, shoes to web services, and web services to the home answering the long awaited standardization from many different markets.
IMPLEMENTATION
Bluetooth low energy technology is designed and optimized for applications with low effective data throughput. The exciting aspect of Bluetooth low energy is its ability to enable low cost devices to be made that can send their data all of the way to the web. It’s based on over ten years of experience and promises to have the fastest growing ecosystem of any wireless standard.
Single mode implementation:
The single mode is the one that truly delivers the ultra low power consumption by being a pure low energy implementation. While classic Bluetooth solutions typically provides battery lifetime of days to weeks on a rechargeable battery, single mode Bluetooth low energy technology implementation can provide months to years of lifetime on a standard coin cell battery. The Wibree stand-alone chip is designed for use with applications which require extremely low power consumption, small size, low cost and where only small quantities of data are transferred.
It's an ideal solution for small devices (like heart-rate monitors) that use only short data messages and must have long battery life.
Examples of devices that would benefit from the Wibree stand-alone chip are: watches, sports and wellness devices and human interface devices (HID) such as wireless keyboards.
Dual mode implementation:
The dual mode combines classic and low energy Bluetooth on a single chip at a very small price delta compared to a classic Bluetooth chip. In addition the radio circuitry is also shared between the classic radio and the low energy radio. The dual mode is designed to enable fast adoption of low energy in classic Bluetooth applications like mobile phones and PC by providing a very low cost delta as well as removing the need to add another radio. Several major mobile phone vendors have indicated that they will adopt dual mode devices in their upcoming phones. The Bluetooth-Wibree dual-mode chip is designed for use in Bluetooth devices. In this type of implementation, Wibree functionality can be integrated with Bluetooth for a minor incremental cost by utilizing key Bluetooth components and the existing Bluetooth RF. This type of implementation allows Bluetooth devices to connect to a new range of tiny battery-powered devices.