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Wi-Fi Direct Overlaps Bluetooth Territory For Connecting Devices
Reber Is Reber writes "The Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new wireless networking specification which will enable devices to establish simple peer-to-peer wireless connections without the need for a wireless router or hotspot. Wi-Fi Direct has a wide array of potential uses, many of which encroach on Bluetooth territory and threaten to make the competing wireless protocol obsolete. 'Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn't available,' said Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa. 'The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise.' Ad hoc wireless networking has always been more complex and cumbersome than it is worth, and it maxes out at 11 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct will connect at existing Wi-Fi speeds-- up to 250 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct devices will also be able to broadcast their availability and seek out other Wi-Fi Direct devices. Wi-Fi Direct overlaps into Bluetooth territory. Bluetooth is a virtually ubiquitous technology used for wireless connection of devices like headphones, mice, or the ever-popular Bluetooth earpiece sticking out of everyone's head. Bluetooth uses less power, but also has a much shorter range and slower transfer speeds. Wi-Fi Direct can enable the same device connectivity as Bluetooth, but at ranges and speeds equivalent to what users experience with existing Wi-Fi connections."
Higher speed so you can talk faster.
But I think it will be a while, at least for the phones. Just about all cell phones have bluetooth, but I have yet to see one besides the iPhone with wifi.
Also, with phones, bluetooth makes a bit more sense to me, as it seems that (I could be wrong) bluetooth would use less power than wifi, why else its more limited range?
What excites me about this is something I've thought about for a while and mentioned once or twice here -- peer to peer telephony. If it got big enough we could put the cell companies out of business.
Free Martian Whores!
Looks to me to be an upgrade to Ad-Hoc.
I was thinking the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised if the protocol was somehow hobbled to keep the copyright nazis happy.
Unless they come up with feature equivalent to the tons of profiles that Bluetooth has, I doubt it'll catch on. The nice thing is not the physical link, it's the fact that I can grab any headset and connect it with any phone. I recently bought a new car that has bluetooth-supporting radio, I can pair my Nokia phone with it, and so can my friend with his Samsung phone. The thing can also import names to the hands-free operated phonebook using the SIM access profile.
Of course, if they'll just use the profiles part of bluetooth spec and change the physical radio interface to 802.11...well, I guess you could do that, but what's the point?
Wi-Fi Direct will include support for WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 2) and AES encryption for more secure connections and measures are being developed to enable IT admins to exert some control over Wi-Fi Direct networks within their environment.
Please don't "include support"
You're writing the spec, REQUIRE THAT IT BE USED.
We're in the 21st century, security should no longer be an after thought.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
file sharing is not piracy
"Bluetooth uses less power" Well, yes and no.
At full transmit power, yea, by a lot. Dial back the dB of the anteanna, and you can make WiFi would for very similar, and possibly less power draw.
If an intelligent WiFi driver is added, power use could by dytnamic, scaling up and down based on range and interference, for the direct connect devices. A multi radio device could potentially use 2 anteanna, one for short range and 1 for traditional AP connections, simultaneously, and might have a quite reasonable power draw compared to using both WiFi and bluetooth concurrently.
Since it has yet to be released in such a fashion, we don;t really have any good data on the energy draw.
A simple P2P only connection, without WiFi otherwise active, yea, bluetooth is probably going to use less power. How many of us have WiFi enabled devices where the WiFi is not left on 24x7 when the device is on regardless of the connectivity, so one could easily argue that WiFi P2P has 0 additional power draw, and simply turning bluetooth on would draw more power.
I can turn off WiFi on the iPhone, but it's a pain to have to do so all the time. It's worse on most other devices... With WiFi on 24x7, my phone outlasts my use needs each day. turning off bluetooth (which i did recently when I cruched a headset and had to wait a few weeks to get a new one) improved the battery life dramatically.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Battery life on mobile devices is still a large issue, and if you are just connecting headsets and syncing up with PCs the extra range isn't needed. So WiFi Direct sounds better for some applications maybe. But we are all sick of our phones crapping out after an hour or two of "heavy" use, and trading range for battery life doesn't make sense for nearly all of the existing uses.
What, am I to worry if someone takes over my keyboard? How likely is thALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO USat to happen?
What about the difference between Wi-Fi being DSSS (direct sequencing spread spectrum, meaning it uses one fixed slice of the spectrum) vs Bluetooth's FHSS (frequency hopping spread spectrum, meaning it hops around the spectrum in a pseudorandom way such that multiple bluetooth devices will never interfere with each other)? Unless the new Wi-Fi standard includes something smarter than "default to channel 6" these devices will not be as friendly to each other as Bluetooth.
There are zero technical details. It's difficult to even know what this standard includes. Zeroconf maybe? Maybe not?
All of the articles contain the same information from the press release. I've contacted several of the magazine authors, and none of them know anything either. Not that that stopped them from telling everyone about how great whatever-it-is is going to be.
Correct me if I'm wrong but the technological "leap" here seems to be that any node can be the server of a wireless communication.
Wi-Fi Direct devices can connect in pairs or in groups. With Wi-Fi Direct only one of the devices needs to be compliant with Wi-Fi Direct to establish the peer-to-peer connection. So, for example, a Wi-Fi Direct-enabled mobile phone could establish a connection with a non-Wi-Fi Direct notebook computer to transfer files between the two.
Seems to be suggesting that a Wi-Fi Direct device will host an access point for the notebook computer to connect to. Otherwise how could such communication with a non Wi-Fi Direct node be possible? There are already certain wireless cards that allow running your device in master mode (appearing as an access point) so that others can connect to you. Combined with a repeater configuration and wireless N speeds and you have the equivalent connectivity of Wi-Fi Direct. So is the leap here that it will be made easy and standard?
I've thought about this too, and it's REALLY cool idea, but I'm not sure if it would work. Even with the internet, not every user's computer is also a server or switch. Phones add the complication of intermittent connections and limited battery power.
Could a mesh network of cell phones function independent of towers? Does anybody who has more knowledge of networking than I do want to chime in?
250 mbps = 250 millibits per second. That's slow.
The point of Bluetooth is not to transfer gigabytes of data. The point of bluetooth is to be able to connect a headset to a cell phone while barely lowering the battery life. The point of bluetooth is to be able to have wireless headphones that can run on a small battery. Wifi direct will be great for printers and the like, but Bluetooth is not going anywhere.
Joe:
We will be making our sales goals for the quarter. I will be needing an increase in our b...utt. I find you sooo sexy and I want your cock. Let's have a threesome with Jane, you know, that old crabby bitty that's been giving me shit since I got into this hell hole of a company. And Joe, I really don't work! I watch gay porn all day and wack off in my office.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
If you are close enough that you can copy songs from my computer over WiFi if I allow it, then you are also close enough to come to my computer, plug in a cheap external drive, and copy the whole lot, again if I allow it.
On behalf of the zombie coaltion, I'm going to ask you to discontinue your suggestions that transmit power of your microwave devices be turned down. Currently, the power emitted is sufficient to get your brains to just the right consistency and temperature to provide a perfect snack. That will not be the case with lower-power devices, and I, for instance, simply don't think that anyone can appreciate a cold brain.
> Of course, if they'll just use the profiles part of bluetooth spec and change the physical radio interface to 802.11...well, I guess you could do that, but what's the point?
The Bluetooth SIG already coopted WiFi as an alternate media Here you go. The point is, you get the bandwidth of WiFi for free.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
But why would you want to go to the work of lugging around an external drive when you could easily do the same thing wirelessly with no extra devices (assuming similar transfer rates as well)? Also, this would be nice for mobile phones as the size of the content being stored and shared is constantly growing, and bluetooth becomes more and more obsolete because of its low transfer rates.
I'd mod myself, but I don't have points. "Informative" would be what you're looking for.
Right, WPS-PBC like operations to perform the link sync and zeoconf at IP level :)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Setup for details.
The interresting part of the spec is a "group mode" which -if true- is completely different from the AdHoc mode !
If no group is there, then this is cool bu only an improved AdHoc mode and I would so understand why it is supposed to be applicable by software. wpa-supplicant anybody ;-)
Rgs,
TM
While I really like the profiles and the interoperability, the more devices that you get in your "circle of stuff" the harder it is to have all your devices continue to default to doing the "right thing".
With one phone, one headset, one computer, one handheld, it's pretty simple. With multiple phones sharing a single hands-free provider (as might be the case of a car Bluetooth system), or multiple computers that might share other components (networking, A2DP headsets) it's harder for it to continue to do the right thing without manual configuration steps. Those steps are pretty easy on a general purpose computer, but hard on a limited-interface device such as a headset.
I don't know how a shift to 802.xx would make that better, easier, harder or just different.
John
What you are doing is making excuses for the special interests. I use a wireless router on my home network and ANYONE ELSE in the area is free to use it as well. For me having an open hotspot is a political statement as much as it is a matter of utility - what you are saying is I no longer should have that right. Well, you wouldn't be the first - the various **AAs have voiced the same views as well as the governemnt for all sorts of reasons.
Fuck all y'all: I use encryption on MY devices, what others use is up to them.
I hate to sound like an Apple Fanboy, but hasn't this already been done with Apple's ZeroConf spec? It's not like it's only available for the Mac either. There are implementations for Windows, Linux, and the BSDs. The spec is out there for anyone to use, so it's not like a hardware manufacturer couldn't roll their own implementation. Why do we need yet another specification that does basically the same thing?
A speed of 250 mbps is not going to cut it. They need speeds measured in Mbps if it is going to be a success.
My opinion? See above.
Good thing words can't have two meanings.
Oh wait, they can. And "piracy" has been used to refer to copyright infringement for over three centuries now ("The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself.") so I'd say it's a pretty damn well-established term. It's not like "intellectual property" or something that's been coined recently.
GREAT! I'm so sick of dealing with shitty bluetooth stacks that don't work reliably. Doesn't seem to matter where the stack is or what it pairs too, the whole system is a horrible buggy pile of partially interoperable shit.
Bluetooth needs to die an incredible fast death.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Probably "none of the above", except that any WiFi-capable unit could talk to any other WiFi-capable unit. So if I want to talk on my car stereo or my small headset today, I need my phone to have Bluetooth, but if I want to copy data from my phone to my computer or vice-versa, I need my phone to have WiFi (*).
If this comes true, then all of my devices use WiFi and I don't need different radios for different purposes. My phone, desktop, car stereo, laptop, headset, keyboard, mouse, etc all use WiFi. If I want my computer to send data to my car stereo, they both have WiFi and I can probably do it.
This is similar to having serial, parallel, FireWire, and USB all consolidating to USB. I don't need 4 different connector types on my computer to connect pretty much any peripheral I damned well please. If it's got "USB" on the label, and has a driver for my operating system, I'm good to go.
So, if anything, the added capabilities of this might make configuring it MORE complex, only because of the new choices available. If you have two headsets, three computers, an access point, three mice, three keyboards, a couple of other cell phones, an iPod, a toaster, and a partridge in a pear tree all in range of your cell phone's WiFi radio, and you hit "discover", you'll have a larger list of things to surf through to find the device you want to connect to. In all likelihood, most profile managers on most platforms will get smart about this and ask what type of device you want to look for, and filter the list accordingly.
(*) yes, I could use a data cable (USB, whatever), but that's not helping the interoperability I'm looking at here.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
So I'm guessing you've never actually used bluetooth devices?
I've used bluetooth on many different devices. Phones, PCs, cars, ect. I can only think of ONE time that bluetooth has 'just worked'. And by just worked I mean it paired off the start and worked the first time. Second use it just didn't.
I'm not sure what devices you are using, but in my experience bluetooth is a buggy unfriendly useless pile of shit that just adds another transmitter receiver pair to a device which already has two actually useful radios already on it.
Bluetooth pairing and profiles may be a great idea, but if the implementations are any indication of how it would be over wifi, then let the worthless POS die now.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If they want to improve on Bluetooth then switch it off the busy 2450 MHz ISM Band to the practically unused 5150 to 5250 MHz U-NII Low Band
Otherwise, we don't need *another* physical layer spec for the service we already have.
FreeBSD.org - The power to serve
Yeah, that's what I thought too. Since more and more devices use both BT and WiFi, why have to power two RF transmitters and associated electronics. BT is a very poor serial link which is only marginally compatible across a wide range of devices. The trick with subbing in WiFi is to get good, power efficient profiles which allows much lower Tx/Rx power for close sources, modulating upwards for weaker connections.
Not to mention that high quality stereo over a multi-Mb connection is going to be much better than anything BT can provide.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
> peer to peer telephony. If it got big enough we could put the cell companies out of business.
Well, it would only work reliably in places where the density of telephones was fairly significant and constant, like urban areas. So we'd be trading an expensive option which sometimes gives coverage of less populated areas with a cheap option which would give practically no coverage of less populated areas.
...as we speak, we have Pre-Wi-Fi Direct hardware available.
In the coming years you can expect
Draft-WiFi Direct
Final Draft-Wifi Direct
and eventually Wifi-Direct hardware from manufacturers
Very true. Similarly, the success of USB is not in using the same plug for everything but in standard device interfaces. You can grab any USB HID device and it will work everywhere, because one can write an unified driver for all current and future USB HID devices. Same for USB mass storage, audio, etc.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I recently bought a new car that has bluetooth-supporting radio, I can pair my Nokia phone with it, and so can my friend with his Samsung phone. The thing can also import names to the hands-free operated phonebook using the SIM access profile.
Yeah, this has been trickling down through the car market for a few years. My 2005 can do the pairing and the phonebook, and with the car's voice command system I can just push a button then say "Call Home" or "Call Victor" or "Call CowboyNeal" and it finds and dials the number.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I highly doubt that Direct Wifi will replace Bluetooth. One reason is that Wifi works on a single channel and does not hop and thus is more susceptible to interference. Bluetooth on the other hand hops across different channels to avoid interfering with other protocols and even other bluetooth devices. Also, Wifi is a big power drain as compared to bluetooth.
You have two computers right next to each other. You want to get a file from one to other... good luck with that. For some totally inexplicable reason, this common situation presents us with a problem that's never been adequately solved. I've seen people sitting next to each other with laptops log on to their webmail accounts to send a file. Only to find that they can't, because the file is too large. Etc.
Let's review your options:
USB's architecture means two hosts can't talk to each other.
Firewire isn't common enough a port, and there are two connector types to worry about.
Ethernet is universal, the cables are cheap, and people might actually carry them around. You no longer need to worry about crossover cables, it's the fastest external interface on the modern PC... do we have a winner?
802.11g/n is also universal. Making a peer-to-peer network in windows isn't exactly easy though, and then you have to convince the other guy to disconnect from whatever network he's on, search the area, connect to yours... several minutes of work and a huge pain in the ass.
And all of the above suffer from the problem that they set up TCP/IP connections. Even with the autoconfig addresses that you'll get after Windows gives up on DHCP, two machines connected over TCP/IP have no practical way to talk to each other. What are you going to do, set up an FTP server? Connect to the C$ share of the other machine? Even if you were to do anything like that, you'd still need to ask for the guy's IP address first. Have fun teaching Ted from accounting about ipconfig.
What we need is something that's more than just a TCP/IP connection... something that automatically discovers the devices around you and gives you the option to easily send them a file. The standard has to specify everything right up to the application layer.
So... we need bluetooth. This is exactly the kind of problem it was made to solve.
The potential of it was ruined by two factors. First is that bluetooth continues to be a $30 option (for a $0.30 chip) on a lot of laptops. Second, and more importantly, there's the matter of the windows bluetooth stack; god help us all. Make the machine discoverable, get the other guy to search for devices in the area, pair them, exchange passkeys... all through an interface that, at least on XP, confuses the shit out of everyone.
In order for Wi-Fi direct to be useful, it will have to be more than just another way to establish a TCP/IP connection, and it will have to let go of this ridiculous obsession with security: pairing and discoverability and pass keys and all that nonsense. Christ, just let two machines talk to each other.
Remember IRDA? It wasn't exactly popular, but it worked. Two computers get in range, windows makes a neat little sound, and you get a systray icon you can click to immediately send files. That's the way it should be. The one time I ever managed to use it, it was glorious.
The solution we've managed to come up with in the absence of this capability is sneakernet for the 21st century: the USB flash drive. At least they're cheap and common now... there was a time when two computers sitting next to each other really had *no* options at all. Now we have these... they're not particularly fast, you're likely but by no means guaranteed to have one lying around, and whatever disposable cereal-box prize you're likely to be using will always have just a little less capacity than you need.
Damn it, it's the future. I want to beam files from one computer to another. Why can't I?
Bluetooth doesn't just ship data. It also forwards the network's 8 kHz clock, which is used for digitizing audio and keeping it synchronized with the (pre-IP) telephone network's digital transport and the far-end D-to-A converters which turn the samples back into audio. This simplifies handsets and avoids "frame-slip" clicking and other audio artifacts from timing irregularities.
Does this new WiFi-variant include a network clock distribution? Or does it fall back on some of the other, more crunch-intensive and less robust solutions to the problem (which are part of the source of VoIP artifacts)? If the latter it may have a harder row to hoe than one might expect. (Though, like VHS vs. Betamax, other things than signal quality may prove to be the important drivers of adoption.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My laptop can also talk to my Bluetooth earpiece for and my 770 to my keyboard, without any problems. I've also never had a problem sending contacts from my phone (or the two phones I had before it; Nokia N70 and Ericsson T68) to other people's phones, without pairing.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I herd you like wireless, so we put bluetoof in your wifi so ur gadgets can talk while u talk.
Having been involved with certifying portable electronics for both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards, let me say that anything that kills off Bluetooth is alright with me. That's the most bizarre, obtuse standard it's ever been my displeasure to work with.
The folks at the Bluetooth SIG are nice enough to deal with, but their standard is ridiculously over-the-top. It's thousands of pages, and almost everything in it is optional. If I was looking for a case study in how not to develop a standard for interoperability, I know right where I'd start.
It's basically a miracle if anything other than passphrase-based connect and the Headset profile works between any two Bluetooth-enabled devices.
Sure, that makes sense.
But the complexity could be managed, or even used. Perhaps with a more capable set of devices I could create "context aware profiles." When I'm home, maybe I want the phone functions to ring the house cordless extensions for my family phone list and the phone's audio stream to go to the stereo, unless the TV is on. It might be difficult or complex to set up, but I could do the configuration on a browser through some clever UI, and tell it to store my wi-fi profile rules on the "me" device (probably my phone), which would share them with all the rest of my devices on demand. The phone would then follow the rules to figure out which profile applies in which scenarios.
That'd be really cool. If the GPS device says "at work", the profile would be silent ringing. If the calendar event category is "important", it would send the callers to voicemail. And I would carry all that stuff automatically with the phone.
John
I think most of the commenters are missing the main point...
a. Bluetooth is great for phones and all, I don't expect that the next year's headsets will use Wi-Fi
b. Wi-fi already has peer-to-peer mode... so what?
I think the point is to:
a. Have a *better* peer-to-peer mode
and (and I'm speculating here...)
b. Have higher level interoperability.
For example, if you have p2p Wi-Fi now, and you manage to connect two devices, then... ?
Nothing. It doesn't work on half the devices, it's a pain on the other half, and all you get is raw TCP/IP if you *do* get it to work.
Compare that with bluetooth's standard file transfer, lack of need of DNS, etc.
If Wi-fi direct can specify something like Apple's bonjour be mandatory for Finding devices and services, and then certain standard services like bluetooth has, then things will become much more automagically usable. Case in point, two PSPs can quickly form a p2p network and the games work easily and well. This is theoretically possible with any PC software or other devices, but it hasn't actually been made to happen yet by anyone.
What we need is something that's more than just a TCP/IP connection... something that automatically discovers the devices around you and gives you the option to easily send them a file.
That is what Zeroconf is for.
Anyone can use it, it's an open standard.
Two mac users on the same WiFi network don't need to find addresses or do anything wonky. They look for the other guys share, who has dragged a file into the public folder of the easily readable system name. Then they copy it.
If you have no WiFi, one guy goes up to the airport menu and says "create network" - then follow the above steps.
Bluetooth is just a bit too slow for stuff like file transfers, WiFi is way better for that. But Bluetooth is great for all the lower device level needs where you want to conserve power and have a lot of different things understand what you are, like keyboards and mice and audio devices and so on.
Each has a place and I don't see a need to muddy that up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ad-Hoc Mode. What's new about this?
So I'm guessing you've never actually used bluetooth devices?
Actually, I have conducted interoperability testing for Bluetooth protocol stack (HCI, L2CAP, SDP, OBEX, RFCOMM) with quite a long list of devices as part of my career. While there are some genuine problems with some devices with bad implementations, most of the isses were really security related. For example the good old Nokia 6310i allowed you to make phone calls WITHOUT authenticating (giving you full Hayes AT command set) if you ignored the service discovery and just connected via rfcomm to another channel instead to the offered "Dial-up networking" service. (If you have the phone and Linux, you can test this yourself with "sdptool browse " and rfcomm connect :))
However, for the most part, if you just want to use a headset or transfer some files, no issues whatsoever tend to occur.
All it needs to make it seamless is a registration button (like the Wii uses for its controllers) you press a button (or select a software option) on device A at the same time as device B. Bish bash bosh they're "associated" and have agreed an encryption scheme, and the simultaneous-button-press algorythm can be written to fail if a third party tries to join in the proceedings (like, i dunno, someone with a telescope and a directional wifi antennae pointing towards you waiting for you to press the button) In fact i'd prefer the above approach to general household wireless networking, rather than relying on DHCP and having a TXT file on a usb stick containing the encryption keys to talk to my own network i could just press said button on the master router at the same time as my new laptop.
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Hooray! Another glitch, just waiting to happen! --TaoBeastie
I thought my laptop already does this...
The Bluetooth 3.0 + HS spec does exactly what you mentioned -- it takes the Bluetooth profiles, and runs them on top of WiFi.
Mod parent up, Bluetooth 3 is on the right track. WiFi radios are so battery expensive, but hugely beneficial in transferring large data files. BT3 will have the ability for the profile to initiate a secure direct WiFi connection only for the life span of the transfer and then turn off the radios again thus keeping this as low-power impacting as possible. Until someone comes up with low power WiFi, BT will be around for a long time.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
I already have that capability in an Ad Hoc wifi connection.
Invenio via vel creo
Ok, so they invented ad-hoc mode now?
Really, it's not even Not Invented Here problem.
Technically, you can use the same radio at different power settings for BT and WiFi.
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Agree with comments about BT profiles - they can be very powerful. The downside is that both sides need to support the same profiles. I waited a long time to get stereo audio (A2DP? profile) on my iPhone, long after purchasing a stereo audio headset. Then it worked great for music but too much lag for watching movies ...
The counter point on the Wi-Fi Direct side is that it's just an IP network. Like the Internet. Creativity can run rapid. Vendors are not restricted to do only what "BT Profiles" provide.
Pros & cons both ways.