Possible applications for the Bluetooth low energy wireless technology include personal healthcare and well being, sports and fitness, security, smart energy and home entertainment, to name but a few.

The Continua Health Alliance has already selected Bluetooth low energy wireless technology for inclusion in the next version of its guidelines. In addition, CSR believes the benefits of Bluetooth low energy technology will also play a role in indoor positioning for boosting location technologies.

CSR’s strategy is to establish an ecosystem of Bluetooth low energy devices using its scalable, modular BlueCore architecture to support both single and dual-mode Bluetooth low energy devices.

The immediate focus is on delivering dual-mode Bluetooth low energy platforms to include the low power capabilities on mobile phones, PCs and netbooks.

Dual-mode Bluetooth technology means the device will support classic Bluetooth technology (the current 3Mbps+EDR technology) as well as the new low energy specification.

Products embedding CSR's dual-mode Bluetooth low energy products will therefore offer the full range of classic Bluetooth technology and Bluetooth low energy technology, as well as the enhanced performance of Bluetooth high speed technology.

Low energy consumption is the hallmark feature of the Bluetooth Core Specification Version 4.0 which was just formally adopted by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). Its very low power characteristic means such Bluetooth low energy devices could run for years on standard coin-cell batteries while offering enhanced communication range, up to 100 meters.   Bluetooth low energy supports very short data packets (8 octet minimum up to 27 octets maximum) that are transferred at 1Mbps. All connections use advanced sniff-subrating to achieve ultra low duty cycles.

Bluetooth low energy uses the adaptive frequency hopping common to all versions of Bluetooth technology to minimize interference from other technologies in the 2.4GHz ISM Band. Efficient multi-path benefits increase the link budgets and range.

Bluetooth low energy places a significant amount of intelligence in the controller, which allows the host to sleep for longer periods of time and be woken up by the controller only when the host needs to perform some action.  This allows for the greatest current savings since the host is assumed to consume more power than the controller.

Bluetooth low energy can support connection setup and data transfer as low as 3ms, allowing an application to form a connection and then transfer authenticated data in few milliseconds for a short communication burst before quickly tearing down the connection.

Full AES-128 encryption using CCM provides strong encryption and authentication of data packets. A 32 bit access address on every packet for each slave, allows billions of devices to be connected uniquely. The technology is optimized for one-to-one connections while allowing one-to-many connections using a star topology.

With the use of quick connections and disconnections, data can move in a mesh-like topology without the complexities of maintaining a mesh network. 

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