Nokia Wibree: A better Bluetooth?
Nokia’s new WiBree technology enables devide to device communication like Bluetooth but uses less power.
The world's top mobile phone maker, Nokia announced its new short-range technology operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band that will be a cost-effective “complementation” for the Bluetooth standard. The new technology is will less power and costs less. The company believes this technology might soon become an industry norm.
But, Wibree uses range (10 meters) and data rate (1 MB) are almost identical to that of Bluetooth. The main difference being, Wibree uses a fraction of the power used by Bluetooth. This helps enabling personal-area communications with watches, wireless keyboards, toys and so on which have limited battery capacity.
Bluetooth uses fixed packet lengths, whereas Wibree utilizes dynamic lengths and that is why consumes less power. It also does not incorporate frequency hopping as Bluetooth does. Wibree is perfect solution in situations where bursty data transfers are needed. Bluetooth is better equipped to handle larger data loads.
Bluetooth devices are able to communicate with each other to ask about capabilities and functions. This is known as the Service Discovery Protocol. It prevents the user from sending documents to your headset or routing a phone call to your printer. Wibree will have something very intelligent to replace this, but we don't know that as yet.
Lots of companies are working closely with Nokia to define the Wibree specification. Companies such as Broadcom, Epson, and Nordic Semiconductor. Nokia is hoping to submit the technology to a worldwide standardization process, which could eventually help it to gain wider support.
Nokia's Wibree is not the only one contender for use in wireless sensors. There are rivals like Zigbee and Zensys too. Zigbee is an ongoing standardization project and has similar characteristics to Wibree. As per the sound byte from these rivals they feel Wibree seems like a marketing spec and are not worried about it at all. They also think Wibree is simply a proprietary solution masked as some type of industry driven push.
Nokia on the other hand believes Wibree will be most successful in four markets: sports, healthcare, entertainment and in the office environment.
Wibree chips available during the second half of 2007.
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