Bluetooth 4.1 — An Evolutionary Update to the Wireless Specification

Bluetooth

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has today announced the Bluetooth 4.1 standard, an important evolutionary update to the wireless specification. The updates will improve consumer usability with increased co-existence support for LTE, among other enhancements.

“Bluetooth Smart technology put us on a rocket ship of growth, with Bluetooth annual product shipment projections skyrocketing to more than 4.5 billion in the next five years,” said Suke Jawanda, Bluetooth SIG CMO. “We updated the Bluetooth specification to address this projected growth, making changes to give developers more control in assigning a role to their product, limiting interference with other wireless technologies, and allowing Bluetooth Smart products to exchange data faster and maintain connections with less manual intervention.

According to the press release, Bluetooth 4.1 extends the Bluetooth brand promise to provide consumers with a simple experience that “just works”, by introducing updates in three areas i.e coexistence, better connections and improved data transfer.

  • Coexistence — engineered to work seamlessly and cooperatively with the latest generation cellular technologies like LTE. Bluetooth and LTE radios can communicate in order to ensure transmissions are coordinated and therefore reduce the possibility of near-band interference. The coordination between the two technologies happens automatically, while the consumer experiences the high quality they expect.
  • Better Connections — provides manufacturers with more control over creating and maintaining Bluetooth connections by making the reconnection time interval flexible and variable. This improves the consumer experience by allowing devices to reconnect automatically when they are in proximity of one another. The consumer can leave the room and upon returning, two recently used devices reconnect without user intervention.
  • Improved Data Transfer — Bluetooth Smart technology provides bulk data transfer. For example, through this new capability, sensors, which gathered data during a run, bike ride or swim, transfer that data more efficiently when the consumer returns home.

The Bluetooth SIG notes that as the Bluetooth Smart ecosystem grows, it expects more solutions to play both a hub and peripheral role. For example, a smart watch acts as a hub gathering information from a Bluetooth Smart heart rate monitor while simultaneously acting as a peripheral to a smartphone, displaying new message notifications from the phone.

For the latest Bluetooth 4.1 technical details and other information, hit up this link.

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