New Technology Convergence with Bluetooth over WiFi for Wireless Transmission

Nowadays most of the mobile devices are already being equipped with wireless capabilities such as Bluetooth and WiFi technologies. While both of them work independently for different data transmission purposes, have you ever imagine that both of them could be possibly converged in one day to achieve better wireless transmission result? Now with the new specification named as Alternate MAC/PHY, it provides a new medium that enables Bluetooth data session to flow on top of Wi-Fi radio with ultra high bandwidth for faster media transmission.

The benefit is obvious – it manages to extract advantages from both wireless technologies by integrating them into an alternate MAC/PHY solution for seamless connectivity in digital home. As you may aware, Bluetooth transmission is slow (less than 3MBps) but it has a major benefit of extremely low power consumption as compared to 802.11 WiFi radio signal. So, by having conventional Bluetooth protocol to establish initial connectivity session with profiles and security pairing but when come to huge multimedia files transfer, the 802.11 wireless technology with 54MBps throughput will able to play its important role in providing a high bandwidth wireless medium for media streaming and bulk video transfer.

No specific hardware requirement being disclosed at this moment but there is speculation that some mobile chipsets in the market may already have the capability and just need to be enabled with software updates. More specification and details will be defined by April this year.