What is Bluetooth 5.1? Everything you need to know about it
Bluetooth special interest group (SIG) announced Bluetooth 5.1 with direction finding feature. Here we will look at some of the important features that Bluetooth 5.1 brings. However, this version of Bluetooth doesn’t consist of a lot of changes from 5.0.
1.Bluetooth Direction Finding
The most important feature of the Bluetooth 5.1 is the direction-finding feature. Current Bluetooth sensors can guess the distance of the Bluetooth device such as a Smartphone or Smartwatch.
But they don’t know the direction of it. This is not the case in 5.1. This version consists of a positioning system that determines the location of the location.
It is done by two different methods called Angle Of Arrival (AoA) and Angel of Departure (AoD). Each of the techniques requires one of the two communication devices to have an array of multiple antennas, with the antenna array included in the receiving device when the AoA method is used and in the transmitting device when using AoD.
2.GATT Caching Enhancement
All Bluetooth low energy connected devices use the Generic Attitude Profile (GATT).When a client Bluetooth device connects to a server Bluetooth device, the server Bluetooth device performs a quick check named “service discovery” to check what are all the service does the client device supports.
This consumes time and energy. In Bluetooth 5.1, it performs more aggressive caching and clients can skip the service discovery stage when nothing is changed. To be more simple, this method takes less time and energy.
3.Advertising Enhancement
Let me tell me you what advertising means here. Advertising is nothing but how your Bluetooth device introduces itself to other Bluetooth devices, like advertising itself to others in the form of “Available to connect”.
Bluetooth 5.0 uses channels in strict order like 37,38 and 39. This will delay the process of the Bluetooth device to be discovered by other Bluetooth devices if another device is trying to advertise at the same time.
Bluetooth 5.1 solves this by allowing the device to select the channels in random. This will be helpful in places with lots of Bluetooth devices.
