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Infrared and Bluetooth Facts

Infrared wireless networking employs light waves that are outside of the visible light spectrum. It uses light from three regions:

• The near IR band (the light wave closest to the color red)
• The intermediate (IM) IR band
• The far IR band

Infrared devices can operate in one of two modes:

You should know the following facts about wireless IR:

• IR data transfers occur at 4 Mbps.
• IR networks are very insecure because the signals are not encrypted, and they can be easily intercepted.
• A common use for IR in networking is in transferring data between a handheld or notebook computer and a desktop computer.

The Bluetooth standard was designed to allow people to connect in PAN (personal area network) configurations using cell phones, PDAs (personal digital assistants), printers, mice, keyboards and other Bluetooth equipped devices. Bluetooth is a proposed standard of the IEEE 802.15 committee.

You should know the following facts about Bluetooth:

• A Bluetooth network uses a master/slave networking mode:
  • One master device controls up to seven slave devices.
  • A PAN can have up to 255 total slave devices.
• Bluetooth uses a 128-bit proprietary encryption mechanism to encrypt its signals.