Archive : 3 December 2014 год

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has officially adopted version 4.2 of the Bluetooth core specification. The upgrades included in v4.2 are said to improve privacy and increase speed. 

"Bluetooth 4.2 is all about continuing to make Bluetooth Smart the best solution to connect all the technology in your life – from personal sensors to your connected home," said Mark Powell, pictured, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG. "In addition to improvements to the specification itself, a new profile, known as IPSP, enables IPv6 for Bluetooth, opening entirely new doors for device connectivity. 

"Bluetooth Smart is the only technology that can scale with the market, provide developers the flexibility to innovate, and be the foundation for the IoT," Powell asserted. 

Bluetooth 4.2 introduces privacy settings that lower power consumption, while building upon Bluetooth's 'government grade' security features. The privacy features make it difficult for eavesdroppers to track a device through its Bluetooth connection without permission. For example, says the SIG, when shopping in a retail store with beacons, unless you've enabled permission for the beacon to engage with your device, you can't be tracked. 

Bluetooth 4.2 enabled devices will be able to transfer data up to 2.5 times more quickly than with previous versions. Faster data transfer and packet capacity is said to make it harder for transmission errors to occur and reduces battery consumption. 

The IPSP will allow Bluetooth Smart sensors to access the Internet directly via IPv6/6LoWPAN allowing Bluetooth Smart edge devices to be managed using the existing IP infrastructure. This is said to suit connected home applications that need personal and wide area control. This profile will be ratified by the end of the year, said the SIG.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk

Michael Hsiao, Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech in the US, has developed mathematical formulae that simulate the methods used by the ants to find the best route to food sources and plans to use these algorithms to improve the accuracy of electronics design. 

According to Prof Hsiao, as electronics designers add more features and capabilities into ever smaller electronics hardware, they are increasing the difficulty of verifying that their designs perform as planned. "A poorly verified design compromises both the system's reliability and its security," he claimed. 

Prof Hsiao's solution is based on a framework called the Ant Colony Optimization method. This employs an automatic stimulus generator on the design to create a database of possible vectors. These are then populated by a swarm of intelligent agents, which deposit the electronic equivalent of a pheromone along their paths to attract other agents. The pheromone evaporates over time, resulting in a reinforcement of the most efficient pathways, allowing for the aggregation of knowledge gained from a large number of agents.

"The framework emphasises the effective modelling and learning from collective effort by extracting the intelligence acquired during the search over multiple abstract models," said Prof Hsiao. 

The simulation loops through multiple runs and branches with the highest fitness values are removed so the system can focus on testing the 'hard corners' in a design. Prof Hsaio says this approach is 'a vast improvement over other methods, covering a far higher percentage of possible states in far less time'.

Author
Graham Pitcher

Source:  www.newelectronics.co.uk