No Blues with Bluetooth!

Part 7: Versions 5.0 to 6.0

- Robert Lacoste

In the last of seven installments about the ubiquitous wireless protocol, Robert explores the bug corrections and new features through Bluetooth Versions 6.0. Previously he wrote about secure connections and he started the series in April 2024 with a review of the low energy protocol.

Welcome back to the world of Bluetooth. In my last six articles in Circuit Cellar, published since April 2024, I presented the overall Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol. In the first article of the series ("No Blues with Bluetooth. Part 1: An Introduction." Circuit Cellar 405, April, 2024) [1], I told you the history of Bluetooth and explained that no less than 14 Bluetooth versions have been introduced since 1999 (Figure 1). In particular, BLE was a new feature of Bluetooth 4.0.

Last month, I talked about Bluetooth 4.2 and its "Secured Connection" feature, which greatly improves the security of BLE. But what are the major features of the other Bluetooth versions? That's a nice subject to close this series, isn't it? So take a seat, and discover Bluetooth 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and last but not least, the newly announced Bluetooth 6.0 (introduced in September, 2024.)

OPTIONS

Before digging into these new versions, I must remind you of a fundamental thing about Bluetooth. Each new version basically provides two things: bug corrections and new features. Bug corrections must be supported to state a compliance with a new version, but new features are always optional (at least since Bluetooth 2.0). In other words, the designer can decide whether or not to support each of the new features.

To be 100 percent clear, it is indeed possible to sell a Bluetooth 6.0 qualified device with absolutely no new features, compared to a Bluetooth 4.0 device, for example. You may argue that a customer would expect to get the newly announced features when buying a new version, but that's not necessarily the case.