Over the past 25 years, Bluetooth® has become almost universally available in billions of products – 5.9 billion devices expected to be shipped just in 2025 – including cars, bikes, doors, gates, and safes that are offering keyless access requiring highly secure locking mechanisms.

The white paper, available for download on this page, examines how Bluetooth® Channel Sounding is implemented via deep integration of timing and RF features in the controller and host stack enabling presence detection and distance measurement via methods such as Phase Based Ranging (PBR) and Round-Trip Timing (RTT), as well as direction determination using angle of arrival and angle of departure (AoA/AoD). The combination and availability of such data have helped evolve Bluetooth into a security platform for precise real-time and secure localization enabling developers to create enhanced and more secure applications. 

Bluetooth Channel Sounding is a cross-industry technology that can be applied to an endless set of applications that stand to benefit from high-precision ranging at low implementation costs. Since it leverages the existing, extensive Bluetooth ecosystem, all categories of Bluetooth connected devices can benefit from it, including the following:

• Consumer products such as mice, keyboards, and game controllers can manage their power states based on their distance from computers and smartphones
• Industrial applications can monitor whether or not staff is within a safe distance from dangerous working areas
• Smart IOT networks can optimize their behavior, for instance, by managing lighting in public spaces
• Automotive and Home applications can unlock cars and house doors by using dedicated key fobs or smartphones