Virtual Sniffing and Bluetooth Stack Vendors
As the complexity of the Bluetooth protocol stack increases Bluetooth stack vendors are realizing that their customers require the use of a powerful Bluetooth protocol analyzer. Even if the stack vendor’s stack is bug free, there are interoperability issues that must be dealt with.
The homegrown hex dumps and trace tools from the early days of Bluetooth just are not good enough anymore. And building a good protocol analyzer is not easy. So stack vendors are partnering with Frontline. This permits the stack vendors to concentrate of improving their stack.
The typical Bluetooth stack vendor provides a Windows-based SDK. The stack vendor interfaces their SDK to ComProbe software by adding a very small amount of code to the SDK, somewhere in the transport area, right about in the same place that HCI data is sent to the Host Controller.
If ComProbe software is installed on the PC and the Virtual sniffer is running then the data will be captured and decoded by ComProbe software, in real-time. If ComProbe software is not installed or the Virtual sniffer is not running then no harm is done. Virtual sniffing is totally passive and has no impact on the behavior of the SDK.
One Frontline stack vendor partner feels so strongly about ComProbe software that not only have they built Virtual sniffing support in their SDK, but they have made ComProbe software an integral part of their product offering. They are actively encouraging all customers on a worldwide basis to adopt ComProbe software as their protocol analysis solution.
Next....