Using visual tags to bypass Bluetooth device discovery

Abstract

One factor that has limited the use of Bluetooth as a networking technology for publicly accessible mobile services is the way in which it handles Device Discovery. Establishing a Bluetooth connection between two devices that have not seen each other before is slow and, from a usability perspective, often awkward. In this paper we present the implementation of an end-to-end Bluetooth-based mobile service framework designed specifically to address this issue. Rather than using the standard Bluetooth Device Discovery model to detect nearby mobile services, our system relies on machine-readable visual tags for out-of-band device and service selection. Our work is motivated by the recent proliferation of cameraphones and PDAs with built-in cameras. We have implemented the described framework completely for Nokia Series 60 cameraphones and demonstrated that our tag-based connection-establishment technique (i) offers order of magnitude time improvements over the standard Bluetooth Device Discovery model; and (ii) is significantly easier to use in a variety of realistic scenarios. Our implementation is available for free download.