Wi-Fi Direct – a flash in the WPAN?
By Vince Holton
Stand back, everybody, the apple cart is in the process of being upturned again. In a move that some observers have suggested threatens Bluetooth’s hold on the WPAN market, the Wi-Fi Alliance tells us it is developing a new version of its spec that will allow Wi-Fi devices to connect in a simpler way. The new specification, which the Wi-Fi Alliance says is ‘nearing completion’ (gestation period akin to ‘.11n, guys?), will enable Wi-Fi devices to connect to one another without joining a traditional home, office, or hotspot network.
The Wi-Fi Alliance expects to begin certification for this new specification in mid-2010, well, I guess we will see, and products which achieve the certification will be designated Wi-Fi certified Wi-Fi Direct.
The specification, previously code-named "Wi-Fi peer-to-peer," can apparently be implemented in any Wi-Fi device, including mobile phones, cameras, printers, notebook computers, plus human interface devices such as keyboards and headphones. Devices that have been certified to the new specification will also be able to create connections with Wi-Fi certified legacy devices already in use. Devices will be able to make a one-to-one connection, or a group of several devices can connect simultaneously.
The spec is apparently aimed at consumer electronics and enterprise applications, provides management features for enterprise environments and includes WPA2 security. Devices that support the specification will be able to discover one another and advertise available services, and some commentators suggest that you will be able to do away with the need to use Wi-Fi routers in some places. Wi-Fi Direct devices will support typical Wi-Fi ranges and the same data rates as can be achieved with an infrastructure connection, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, which plans to publish its peer-to-peer specification upon completion. Only Wi-Fi Alliance member companies will be able to certify devices to the new specification.
A view from the bridge
As I said at the top, some industry watchers say Wi-Fi Direct could pose a threat to the future of Bluetooth, and the Bluetooth SIG has taken a fairly robust position. Exec director Mike Foley’s full, official statement can be seen at the end of this story. It is lengthy, and I suggest you skip to the end of this story and read that as it is kinda significant, and then come back here. Please.
I will continue, assuming that you have ....
Others industry observers have been a little more forthright in their comments. It’s appropriate to share some of their views with Incisor’s readers.
Stephen Wood, up until recently the president of the WiMedia Alliance, and a technology strategist at Intel until his recent move into self-employment, commented: “It is a normal behavior for companies/technologies to try to consume adjacent applications to expand their business. That’s excellent for the stockholders of the company trying to expand, but it is not necessarily beneficial to the consumer. On the positive side, the competition will force Bluetooth to come to grips with their ease of use issues in order to compete. On the negative side, the Wi-Fi introduction will create greater customer confusion, interoperability issues, operational complexity and will accelerate spectrum congestion due to additional protocol overhead.” Wood continued, “If this move were to be done for the benefit of consumers, one would see efforts to blend the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth organizations to harmonize and simplify the collected offering. If it is done to increase revenue for the Wi-Fi silicon manufacturers, I would expect to see competing claims of superiority and efforts to displace existing Bluetooth sockets by the Wi-Fi manufacturers. Regardless of who wins this contest, let’s hope that the consumers get a device that is easy to use. It’s a goal that both groups have found challenging to meet so far.”
Technology strategist #2, Nick Hunn, a stalwart of the SRW industry, had plenty to say (who said ‘nothing new there’?). “There’s a lot of hot air been expelled over Wi-Fi Direct and its perceived threat to Bluetooth. A lot of it comes from PC industry pundits, who don’t understand that their technology is sinking as it hits the iceberg of mobile telephony. Much of the debate is academic. Both are underlying wireless transports that just perform the mechanics of shifting data. Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth 3.0 both use the same underlying 802.11 standard, so there’s likely to be no difference in throughput between them. Bluetooth 3.0 has some nice features, such as allowing concurrent ad-hoc connections and hotspot access, concurrent 802.11 and Bluetooth audio performance and ad-hoc security managed by the Bluetooth link itself. All of these are useful tools that help to provide an easier user experience. It may also have the edge in power consumption, as it only uses the inherently power hungry 802.11 technology when it is needed.”
Hunn continued: “We won’t know how these features compare until the first Wi-Fi Direct products appear. That may take a little longer than the press release implies, as I suspect there will be several vested interests trying to slide their IP into the spec, which will inevitably slow things down. Unless, of course, the Wi-Fi Alliance allows its members to launch pre- pre- Wi-Fi Direct products. At the end of the day, the current debate misses the point, which is that users just want to share data. They want a user interface that says “Send to a Friend”. They don’t care whether it’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE or (dare I say) UWB. As long as it’s included in their monthly call plan, it’s easy and it works.”
Wi-Fi Direct means that Wi-Fi is invading territory that once was to be UWB’s ballpark. Gary Anderson, CEO of Ultra-wideband company Uraxs, put it even more bluntly: “In the long run it will prove to be of no real threat, just a waste of time and resources. Wi-Fi is not meant to be a peer to peer technology because instead of economy of scale you get diminishing returns. I think Wi-Fi-Direct will prove to be a security, interference, and power management nightmare, if it ever materializes at all.”
If there is a bush in the vicinity, Anderson is certainly not beating around it.
Meanwhile, Fiona Thomson, research director at IMS Research saw it like this: “I think Wi-Fi Direct is a neat idea but maybe a bit late in coming? Outside of the typical handset/headset use-case I think transferring (small) files using Bluetooth is probably what Bluetooth is most commonly used for already - albeit a bit slow and probably used more by younger generations to transfer pictures, ring tones etc. Bluetooth high-speed should help with the speed issue and ensure it remains competitive/ahead of Wi-Fi Direct.”
Thomson felt that there was an undercurrent behind the Wi-Fi Alliance’s announcement. “Slightly controversially, it feels like the Wi-Fi guys are starting to do what the Bluetooth guys have been doing for a while – tweaking a technology to applications which it’s not really been designed for.” Thomson’s final comment could bring a little comfort to the Bluetooth community. “My colleague Filomena Berardi has been following this more recently for her report ‘Peer-to-Peer Wireless – Which High Speed Technology?’. I asked her thoughts and she said that while the new spec is adequate for data transfers, she’s not sure the approach really fits the streaming (audio and video) application well. In addition, during the research many interviewees argued that the 802.11 infrastructure works very well for the purposes of LAN but for PAN applications, other technologies such as Bluetooth work better.”
The sharks are circling
Whatever the technical merits and usability prospects are for Wi-Fi Direct, here at Incisor we believe that there is perhaps something more sinister going on. Of all of the wireless sectors that Incisor has followed, Wi-Fi is populated by the most aggressive and predatory gunslingers.
Even based on our limited technical understanding, it is quite clear that Wi-Fi Direct will not be the simple to use panacea that the Wi-Fi Alliance would like us to believe. But, there are a lot of powerful companies in the Wi-Fi sector that will doubtless throw all of their weight behind the trade and consumer PR campaign that we can expect to see rolled out over the coming months, and they will that say that it is. There seems little question that the goal is to make Wi-Fi the predominant short-range wireless technology and no prisoners will be taken along the way.
Unconvinced? Well, look at what happened to Ultra-wideband. This (UWB) is an extremely clever solution, and for moving large amounts of data about in WPAN applications, while using very small amounts of battery power to do so, it is unrivalled. Neither Bluetooth nor Wi-Fi comes close. This is why UWB was the partner of choice for the Bluetooth SIG to align with as its High Speed Bluetooth solution. It was publicly announced as such. But what happened? What happened is that the Wi-Fi proponents systematically stamped out UWB, using the financial clout of big-time Wi-Fi companies and the influence of their execs on various wireless technology alliances/SIGs and forums. Some will protest this was not the case, but many more quietly acknowledge that this was what happened.
But it doesn’t stop there. It seems that the Wi-Fi companies are not satisfied with wiping out UWB, they want all of the available SRW business that there is. Wi-Fi, they say, can do any job that needs to be done by a short-range, WPAN technology. Are they (the Wi-Fi companies) looking to take on Bluetooth? Is it possible that Bluetooth could be threatened by Wi-Fi? Rather than being a partner to provide a high-speed data channel for Bluetooth in the Alternative MAC/PHY scenario, is Wi-Fi actually a viper in the nest? For what it is worth, I believe that Bluetooth is the technology for the WPAN, and 3 billion installed Bluetooth devices and the presence of the tech in the vast majority of handsets will mean that that continues to be the case.
Many will argue that Wi-Fi Direct’s attempt on global SRW domination is built upon foundations of sand, and with plenty of justification. But this is to ignore the fact that exactly the same was true when Wi-Fi set out to displace Ultra-wideband.
So, there would seem to be interesting times ahead of us. As we said in the crummy pun headline, is Wi-Fi Direct a flash in the WPAN? We don’t yet know. But we expect the push to establish Wi-Fi Direct to be relentless. And, with the Wi-Fi community’s willingness to pre-release equipment to ‘draft’ specifications, how long will it be before we start seeing Wi-Fi Certified Wi-Fi Direct (Draft) products on retail shelves, confusing the heck out of consumers?
One thing is for sure ... We doubt this is the last time Incisor will be writing about Wi-Fi Direct.
Bluetooth SIG: official response to Wi-Fi Direct
The announcement of Wi-Fi Direct, from the Wi-Fi Alliance, has resulted in confusion in the wireless industry. Not too long ago, it was well understood that Wi-Fi was the best technology for wireless LAN (i.e. connecting a personal device to the Internet) and Bluetooth wireless technology was best suited for wireless PAN (i.e. connecting personal devices to each other). However, once 802.11 and Bluetooth radios both started appearing in a single device, such as a mobile phone or personal computer, the question quickly arose regarding how the 802.11 radio could be leveraged to enhance PAN scenarios. The answer to this question was the Bluetooth v3.0 + HS specification adopted this past April by the Bluetooth SIG. This specification defines how an 802.11 radio can be utilized in conjunction with a Bluetooth radio. The combination of the two radios results in a complete, power efficient system that utilizes the best features of each technology to deliver the personal area networking scenarios.
The Bluetooth v3.0 + HS specification does not utilize Wi-Fi. It utilizes 802.11 which is a specification published by the IEEE. Utilizing existing Bluetooth features, such as easy pairing and profiles, enables complete solutions that are useful and make sense for consumers familiar with the technology they have used over the years in the more than three billion Bluetooth products already in the market.
A Wi-Fi Direct connection is simply that: a network connection between two devices. Consider plugging a PC and printer into a switch using Ethernet cables and trying to print a picture. (Recall the original name of Wi-Fi was wireless Ethernet.) While the two devices will have network connectivity, and assuming there is IP infrastructure in place (DHCP, DNS, etc.) or they auto IP the same way, they will have the potential to communicate utilizing the IP protocol. Now all one has to do is install an IP port for the printer and install the driver. In the home environment, that isn’t too bad because the consumer probably has the printer’s driver and setting up the port once isn’t overly burdensome. However, in the home the consumer most likely has an access point and would rather make the printer available to all PCs in the house so one would most likely connect to the network via the access point instead of Wi-Fi Direct. When mobile, a driver most likely isn’t available and even if it was, installing it to print once is overly burdensome for the consumer. Once the printer is installed on the PC and the driver loaded, the picture can then be printed. Similar ease-of-use limitations occur when any popular scenario is explored.
Conversely, two products implementing Bluetooth technology leverage standardized profiles. For the example above, one typically right clicks on the picture to be printed and selects “print” or “send to.” The printer is then discovered and the picture prints without requiring additional drivers or software. Simple. Easy. Effective.
Clearly, there are multiple solutions available for IP service discovery. Any of these could be utilized to simplify the IP-based printing scenario described above. Unfortunately, having multiple service discovery solutions overly complicates the scenario for the consumer. It is highly unlikely that manufacturers will converge on one solution. Instead, the consumer will have to understand which solution their products implement and only purchase compatible ones. Thus the Wi-Fi Direct distinction will mean very little to the consumer. Instead, they will have to understand whether they have a UPnP, Bonjour, DLNA, SLP or fill-in-the-blank product. With a Bluetooth solution, the consumer simply needs to know they have Bluetooth enabled products.
Stand back, everybody, the apple cart is in the process of being upturned again. In a move that some observers have suggested threatens Bluetooth’s hold on the WPAN market, the Wi-Fi Alliance tells us it is developing a new version of its spec that will allow Wi-Fi devices to connect in a simpler way. The new specification, which the Wi-Fi Alliance says is ‘nearing completion’ (gestation period akin to ‘.11n, guys?), will enable Wi-Fi devices to connect to one another without joining a traditional home, office, or hotspot network.
The Wi-Fi Alliance expects to begin certification for this new specification in mid-2010, well, I guess we will see, and products which achieve the certification will be designated Wi-Fi certified Wi-Fi Direct.
The specification, previously code-named "Wi-Fi peer-to-peer," can apparently be implemented in any Wi-Fi device, including mobile phones, cameras, printers, notebook computers, plus human interface devices such as keyboards and headphones. Devices that have been certified to the new specification will also be able to create connections with Wi-Fi certified legacy devices already in use. Devices will be able to make a one-to-one connection, or a group of several devices can connect simultaneously.
The spec is apparently aimed at consumer electronics and enterprise applications, provides management features for enterprise environments and includes WPA2 security. Devices that support the specification will be able to discover one another and advertise available services, and some commentators suggest that you will be able to do away with the need to use Wi-Fi routers in some places. Wi-Fi Direct devices will support typical Wi-Fi ranges and the same data rates as can be achieved with an infrastructure connection, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance, which plans to publish its peer-to-peer specification upon completion. Only Wi-Fi Alliance member companies will be able to certify devices to the new specification.
A view from the bridge
As I said at the top, some industry watchers say Wi-Fi Direct could pose a threat to the future of Bluetooth, and the Bluetooth SIG has taken a fairly robust position. Exec director Mike Foley’s full, official statement can be seen at the end of this story. It is lengthy, and I suggest you skip to the end of this story and read that as it is kinda significant, and then come back here. Please.
I will continue, assuming that you have ....
Others industry observers have been a little more forthright in their comments. It’s appropriate to share some of their views with Incisor’s readers.
Stephen Wood, up until recently the president of the WiMedia Alliance, and a technology strategist at Intel until his recent move into self-employment, commented: “It is a normal behavior for companies/technologies to try to consume adjacent applications to expand their business. That’s excellent for the stockholders of the company trying to expand, but it is not necessarily beneficial to the consumer. On the positive side, the competition will force Bluetooth to come to grips with their ease of use issues in order to compete. On the negative side, the Wi-Fi introduction will create greater customer confusion, interoperability issues, operational complexity and will accelerate spectrum congestion due to additional protocol overhead.” Wood continued, “If this move were to be done for the benefit of consumers, one would see efforts to blend the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth organizations to harmonize and simplify the collected offering. If it is done to increase revenue for the Wi-Fi silicon manufacturers, I would expect to see competing claims of superiority and efforts to displace existing Bluetooth sockets by the Wi-Fi manufacturers. Regardless of who wins this contest, let’s hope that the consumers get a device that is easy to use. It’s a goal that both groups have found challenging to meet so far.”
Technology strategist #2, Nick Hunn, a stalwart of the SRW industry, had plenty to say (who said ‘nothing new there’?). “There’s a lot of hot air been expelled over Wi-Fi Direct and its perceived threat to Bluetooth. A lot of it comes from PC industry pundits, who don’t understand that their technology is sinking as it hits the iceberg of mobile telephony. Much of the debate is academic. Both are underlying wireless transports that just perform the mechanics of shifting data. Wi-Fi Direct and Bluetooth 3.0 both use the same underlying 802.11 standard, so there’s likely to be no difference in throughput between them. Bluetooth 3.0 has some nice features, such as allowing concurrent ad-hoc connections and hotspot access, concurrent 802.11 and Bluetooth audio performance and ad-hoc security managed by the Bluetooth link itself. All of these are useful tools that help to provide an easier user experience. It may also have the edge in power consumption, as it only uses the inherently power hungry 802.11 technology when it is needed.”
Hunn continued: “We won’t know how these features compare until the first Wi-Fi Direct products appear. That may take a little longer than the press release implies, as I suspect there will be several vested interests trying to slide their IP into the spec, which will inevitably slow things down. Unless, of course, the Wi-Fi Alliance allows its members to launch pre- pre- Wi-Fi Direct products. At the end of the day, the current debate misses the point, which is that users just want to share data. They want a user interface that says “Send to a Friend”. They don’t care whether it’s Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G, LTE or (dare I say) UWB. As long as it’s included in their monthly call plan, it’s easy and it works.”
Wi-Fi Direct means that Wi-Fi is invading territory that once was to be UWB’s ballpark. Gary Anderson, CEO of Ultra-wideband company Uraxs, put it even more bluntly: “In the long run it will prove to be of no real threat, just a waste of time and resources. Wi-Fi is not meant to be a peer to peer technology because instead of economy of scale you get diminishing returns. I think Wi-Fi-Direct will prove to be a security, interference, and power management nightmare, if it ever materializes at all.”
If there is a bush in the vicinity, Anderson is certainly not beating around it.
Meanwhile, Fiona Thomson, research director at IMS Research saw it like this: “I think Wi-Fi Direct is a neat idea but maybe a bit late in coming? Outside of the typical handset/headset use-case I think transferring (small) files using Bluetooth is probably what Bluetooth is most commonly used for already - albeit a bit slow and probably used more by younger generations to transfer pictures, ring tones etc. Bluetooth high-speed should help with the speed issue and ensure it remains competitive/ahead of Wi-Fi Direct.”
Thomson felt that there was an undercurrent behind the Wi-Fi Alliance’s announcement. “Slightly controversially, it feels like the Wi-Fi guys are starting to do what the Bluetooth guys have been doing for a while – tweaking a technology to applications which it’s not really been designed for.” Thomson’s final comment could bring a little comfort to the Bluetooth community. “My colleague Filomena Berardi has been following this more recently for her report ‘Peer-to-Peer Wireless – Which High Speed Technology?’. I asked her thoughts and she said that while the new spec is adequate for data transfers, she’s not sure the approach really fits the streaming (audio and video) application well. In addition, during the research many interviewees argued that the 802.11 infrastructure works very well for the purposes of LAN but for PAN applications, other technologies such as Bluetooth work better.”
The sharks are circling
Whatever the technical merits and usability prospects are for Wi-Fi Direct, here at Incisor we believe that there is perhaps something more sinister going on. Of all of the wireless sectors that Incisor has followed, Wi-Fi is populated by the most aggressive and predatory gunslingers.
Even based on our limited technical understanding, it is quite clear that Wi-Fi Direct will not be the simple to use panacea that the Wi-Fi Alliance would like us to believe. But, there are a lot of powerful companies in the Wi-Fi sector that will doubtless throw all of their weight behind the trade and consumer PR campaign that we can expect to see rolled out over the coming months, and they will that say that it is. There seems little question that the goal is to make Wi-Fi the predominant short-range wireless technology and no prisoners will be taken along the way.
Unconvinced? Well, look at what happened to Ultra-wideband. This (UWB) is an extremely clever solution, and for moving large amounts of data about in WPAN applications, while using very small amounts of battery power to do so, it is unrivalled. Neither Bluetooth nor Wi-Fi comes close. This is why UWB was the partner of choice for the Bluetooth SIG to align with as its High Speed Bluetooth solution. It was publicly announced as such. But what happened? What happened is that the Wi-Fi proponents systematically stamped out UWB, using the financial clout of big-time Wi-Fi companies and the influence of their execs on various wireless technology alliances/SIGs and forums. Some will protest this was not the case, but many more quietly acknowledge that this was what happened.
But it doesn’t stop there. It seems that the Wi-Fi companies are not satisfied with wiping out UWB, they want all of the available SRW business that there is. Wi-Fi, they say, can do any job that needs to be done by a short-range, WPAN technology. Are they (the Wi-Fi companies) looking to take on Bluetooth? Is it possible that Bluetooth could be threatened by Wi-Fi? Rather than being a partner to provide a high-speed data channel for Bluetooth in the Alternative MAC/PHY scenario, is Wi-Fi actually a viper in the nest? For what it is worth, I believe that Bluetooth is the technology for the WPAN, and 3 billion installed Bluetooth devices and the presence of the tech in the vast majority of handsets will mean that that continues to be the case.
Many will argue that Wi-Fi Direct’s attempt on global SRW domination is built upon foundations of sand, and with plenty of justification. But this is to ignore the fact that exactly the same was true when Wi-Fi set out to displace Ultra-wideband.
So, there would seem to be interesting times ahead of us. As we said in the crummy pun headline, is Wi-Fi Direct a flash in the WPAN? We don’t yet know. But we expect the push to establish Wi-Fi Direct to be relentless. And, with the Wi-Fi community’s willingness to pre-release equipment to ‘draft’ specifications, how long will it be before we start seeing Wi-Fi Certified Wi-Fi Direct (Draft) products on retail shelves, confusing the heck out of consumers?
One thing is for sure ... We doubt this is the last time Incisor will be writing about Wi-Fi Direct.
Bluetooth SIG: official response to Wi-Fi Direct
The announcement of Wi-Fi Direct, from the Wi-Fi Alliance, has resulted in confusion in the wireless industry. Not too long ago, it was well understood that Wi-Fi was the best technology for wireless LAN (i.e. connecting a personal device to the Internet) and Bluetooth wireless technology was best suited for wireless PAN (i.e. connecting personal devices to each other). However, once 802.11 and Bluetooth radios both started appearing in a single device, such as a mobile phone or personal computer, the question quickly arose regarding how the 802.11 radio could be leveraged to enhance PAN scenarios. The answer to this question was the Bluetooth v3.0 + HS specification adopted this past April by the Bluetooth SIG. This specification defines how an 802.11 radio can be utilized in conjunction with a Bluetooth radio. The combination of the two radios results in a complete, power efficient system that utilizes the best features of each technology to deliver the personal area networking scenarios.
The Bluetooth v3.0 + HS specification does not utilize Wi-Fi. It utilizes 802.11 which is a specification published by the IEEE. Utilizing existing Bluetooth features, such as easy pairing and profiles, enables complete solutions that are useful and make sense for consumers familiar with the technology they have used over the years in the more than three billion Bluetooth products already in the market.
A Wi-Fi Direct connection is simply that: a network connection between two devices. Consider plugging a PC and printer into a switch using Ethernet cables and trying to print a picture. (Recall the original name of Wi-Fi was wireless Ethernet.) While the two devices will have network connectivity, and assuming there is IP infrastructure in place (DHCP, DNS, etc.) or they auto IP the same way, they will have the potential to communicate utilizing the IP protocol. Now all one has to do is install an IP port for the printer and install the driver. In the home environment, that isn’t too bad because the consumer probably has the printer’s driver and setting up the port once isn’t overly burdensome. However, in the home the consumer most likely has an access point and would rather make the printer available to all PCs in the house so one would most likely connect to the network via the access point instead of Wi-Fi Direct. When mobile, a driver most likely isn’t available and even if it was, installing it to print once is overly burdensome for the consumer. Once the printer is installed on the PC and the driver loaded, the picture can then be printed. Similar ease-of-use limitations occur when any popular scenario is explored.
Conversely, two products implementing Bluetooth technology leverage standardized profiles. For the example above, one typically right clicks on the picture to be printed and selects “print” or “send to.” The printer is then discovered and the picture prints without requiring additional drivers or software. Simple. Easy. Effective.
Clearly, there are multiple solutions available for IP service discovery. Any of these could be utilized to simplify the IP-based printing scenario described above. Unfortunately, having multiple service discovery solutions overly complicates the scenario for the consumer. It is highly unlikely that manufacturers will converge on one solution. Instead, the consumer will have to understand which solution their products implement and only purchase compatible ones. Thus the Wi-Fi Direct distinction will mean very little to the consumer. Instead, they will have to understand whether they have a UPnP, Bonjour, DLNA, SLP or fill-in-the-blank product. With a Bluetooth solution, the consumer simply needs to know they have Bluetooth enabled products.
Labels: Bluetooth, UWB, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, WPAN
posted by Vince Holton at
5:19 AM
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