Using Bluetooth Technology in a Demanding Environment where Reliability, Robustness and Interoperability are Key Success Factors

Applications that are considered more or less critical include the use of Bluetooth to transfer live process information between different parts of an industrial / medical system.

This white paper covers the use of Bluetooth in mission critical industrial and medical applications and discusses these applications from the viewpoint of Bluetooth architecture and conducted studies on Bluetooth reliability.

For these mission critical applications, radio link reliability is very important in order to fulfill the high demands on deterministic behavior and real-time performance. Important issues to be addressed include interference with other Bluetooth nodes, coexistence with other radio standards like Wireless LAN (WLAN) IEEE 802.11 b, g, n and potential noise from other radiating sources like certain types of equipment such as industrial devices, medical devices or commercial devices like microwave ovens. If interference occurs it can affect the connection robustness. With several wireless standards operating in the 2.4GHz ISM band Bluetooth has adopted several robust features.

Bluetooth Architecture and Reliability
A Classic Bluetooth network (piconet) consists of one master / host and up to seven active
slaves / clients. The devices can switch roles, by agreement, and the slave can become the
master. When a Classic Bluetooth device is doing service discovery or connection setup it
may disturb other wireless connections in the same ISM band whereby frequency planning of
those technologies are needed.

To read more, click read whitepaper below.