Case Studies: Virtual Sniffing and Bluetooth Mobile Phone Makers
Case Study # 1
A Bluetooth mobile phone maker had been using a homemade HCI trace tool to debug the link between the Host CPU in the phone the Bluetooth chip. They also were using an air sniffer. They replaced their entire sniffing setup by moving to ComProbe software.
In the original test setup the Host CPU in the phone would send debug messages and HCI data over a serial link. A program running on a PC logged the output from the Host CPU. To implement the new system using Virtual sniffing, a small change was made to the PC logging program and it now sends the data to ComProbe software using the Live Import API. The HCI traffic is fully decoded and the debug messages are decoded as well.
The decoder for the debug messages was written using ComProbe software’s DecoderScript feature. DecoderScript allows ComProbe software user to write custom decodes and to modify decodes supplied with ComProbe software. DecoderScript is supplied as a standard part of ComProbe software. In this case, the customer also created a custom decoder for HCI Vendor Extensions.
The air sniffer that was formerly used has been replaced by the standard ComProbe software air sniffer.
Case Study # 2
A second Bluetooth mobile phone maker plans to use Virtual sniffing in conjunction with a Linux-based custom test platform they have developed. Currently they capture serial HCI traffic on their Linux system and use a set of homegrown utilities to decode the captured data.
They plan to send the captured serial HCI traffic out of the Linux system using TCP/IP over Ethernet. Over on the PC running ComProbe software they will use a simple TCP/IP listening program to bring the data into the PC and this program will hand the data off to ComProbe software using the Live Import API.
Next....