Bluetooth: a viable solution for IoT? [Industry Perspectives]

The news that Qualcomm is buying the dominant Bluetooth chip vendor, CSR, is creating speculation in the industry that Qualcomm is betting Bluetooth for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Bluetooth, the technology once pronounced dead by a trade magazine journalist in 2003 [1], has enjoyed popularity and prosperity in the last 10 years for audio communications and stereo streaming. ABI Research predicts that over 3 billion Bluetooth enabled devices will be shipped in 2014, and over 10 billion Bluetooth enabled devices will be on the market by 2018. With the maturity of the technology and its strong presence in the marketplace, the Bluetooth industry is working on expanding the applications of the technology to short-range wireless communication markets other than audio and stereo communications, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Currently, it is being used for M2M applications such as credit card readers [2]. For Bluetooth to be suitable for M2M and IoT applications, it needs to reduce power consumption so that it can be used in batterypowered devices for a longer period of time or even the lifetime of the device. To achieve that, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) introduced Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which was first specified in Bluetooth 4.0 [3] and further improved in Bluetooth 4.1 [4]. In addition, the Bluetooth stakeholders also expanded work on it, with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working on the standardization effort of facilitating Bluetooth in exchanging IP packets.