Book Image

Building Bluetooth Low Energy Systems

By : Muhammad Usama bin Aftab
Book Image

Building Bluetooth Low Energy Systems

By: Muhammad Usama bin Aftab

Overview of this book

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a Wireless Personal Area network technology aimed at novel applications for smart devices. High-tech BLE profiles and services are being increasingly used by application developers and hardware enthusiasts to allow devices to interact with the surrounding world. This book will focus on a technical introduction to BLE and how it is reshaping small-distance communication. We will start with IoT, where many technologies such as BLE, Zigbee, and IEEE 802.15.4 Mesh will be introduced. The book will present BLE from an engineering perspective, from which the protocol stack, architecture, and layers are discussed. You will learn to implement customized projects for Peripheral/Central communication, BLE Beacons, indoor navigation using triangulation, and the Internet gateway for Bluetooth Low Energy Personal Network, all using various code samples and APIs on Android, iOS, and the Web. Finally, the book will conclude with a glimpse into future technologies destined to be prominent in years to come.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Bluetooth Low Energy central and peripheral


The fundamental communication technique used in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is client-server architecture. This mode of communication has been used in the computing industry for over half a century and is proven to be very successful over the years. The term client-server is used in its critical definition:

  • Client: A device that asks for the data from the server
  • Server: A device that serves the data to the client

It is a distributed architecture that divides the responsibilities between a receiver and a provider, in other words, a client and a server. Technically, client and server reside on different machines but it is completely possible that single-machine hosts both. Bluetooth Low Energy works on the same concept of data exchange. There is a BLE GATT client which asks for the data from the BLE GATT server.

Note

The word GATT is an acronym of the Generic Attribute Profile and it defines the way a BLE device behave in the communication.

Keeping GATT...