The Industry’s Best Testing Tools of BlueTooth

While going over the plans for the version 4.1 release of the Profile Tuning Suite (PTS) earlier today, it struck me how far the testing of Bluetooth products has come over the past decade. Looking back, it’s almost comical to think that Bluetooth technology initially relied upon “Golden Units” for testing. This methodology was so flawed that one would never consider bringing a new technology to market using such a testing scheme today. Instead, we have a comprehensive suite of test tools consisting of:

• Validated test equipment for the lower layers of the protocol stack.
• PTS for the higher layers of the protocol stack.
• Our online Test Plan Generator. Sniffers to capture air traffic.
• Online training videos.

The online Test Plan Generator makes it easy to determine which tests need to be run for a given product from the set of approximately 1,700 test cases available. In addition to the “traditional” Bluetooth test cases, before the end of the year the Bluetooth SIG will publish test cases for Bluetooth high speed technology, providing the most comprehensive test package for 802.11 available in the industry.

The PTS is a black box testing system allowing any profile and role to be emulated to test a product implementing the complimentary profile and role. Over 47 man years of development effort has gone into the PTS. Test suites are available for every Bluetooth profile and six protocols. More than 8,000 instances of the PTS have been installed in 500 different member companies. Through member testing with the PTS, over 7,000 issues in products have been detected and fixed before shipping those products to consumers.

Between development, testing and member usage, the thousands of man-years invested in these tools provide two key benefits:

• Enables members to quickly and inexpensively create products.
• Ensure high quality products are available to consumers.

While we have come a long way over the past decade, we continue to improve the tools just as quickly as Bluetooth technology adds features to enable new use cases. Through this rich set of testing tools, the Bluetooth SIG has set the bar for which all technologies should now be measured.