Why HCI Sniffing and Virtual Sniffing are Useful
Because the Bluetooth protocol stack is very complex, a Bluetooth protocol analyzer is an important part of all Bluetooth development environments. The typical Bluetooth protocol analyzer “taps” a Bluetooth link by capturing data over the air. For many Bluetooth developers sniffing the link between a Bluetooth Host CPU and a Bluetooth Host Controller—also known as HCI-sniffing—is much more useful than air sniffing.
HCI-sniffing provides direct visibility into the commands being sent to a Bluetooth chip and the responses to those commands. With air sniffing a software engineer working on the host side of a Bluetooth chip has to infer and often guess at what their software is doing. With HCI-sniffing, the software engineer can see exactly what is going on. HCI-sniffing often results in faster and easier debugging than air sniffing.
ComProbe software’s Virtual sniffing feature is a simple and easy way to perform HCI-sniffing. Virtual sniffing is not limited to just HCI-sniffing, but it is the most common use and this white paper will focus on the HCI-sniffing application of Virtual sniffing.
It is also important to understand that ComProbe software is a multi-mode product. ComProbe software does support traditional air sniffing. It also supports serial HCI sniffing (for the H4 (HCI UART), H5 (3-wire UART) , and BCSP (BlueCore Serial Protocol) protocols), USB HCI (H2) sniffing, SDIO sniffing, and Virtual sniffing. So with ComProbe software nothing is sacrificed—the product is simply more functional than other Bluetooth protocol analyzers.
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