The use of Bluetooth in Linux and location aware computing

Abstract

The Bluetooth specification describes a robust and powerful technology for short-range wireless communication. Unfortunately, the specification is immense and complicated, presenting a formidable challenge for novice developers. Currently, there is a lack of satisfactory technical documentation describing Bluetooth application development and the parts of the Bluetooth specification that are relevant to software developers. This thesis explains Bluetooth programming in the context of Internet programming and shows how most concepts in Internet programming are easily translated to Bluetooth. It describes how these concepts can be implemented in the GNU/Linux operating system using the BlueZ Bluetooth protocol stack and libraries. A Python extension module is presented that was created to assist in rapid development and deployment of Bluetooth applications. Finally, an inexpensive and trivially deployed infrastructure for location aware computing is presented, with a series of experiments conducted to determine how best to exploit such an infrastructure.