File transfer using Bluetooth

Abstract: Bluetooth is one of the standards for wireless communication. It is excepted
that the number of services provided over Bluetooth links will rapidly
increase during the next few years. This puts hard demands on the Bluetooth
specification, to preserve the interoperability between services offered
from different manufactures. It’s the Blutooth profile specification that
states the requirements on a Bluetooth application.
This thesis investigates one of the existing application profiles, the file
transfer application profile and the requirements for the implementation of
that profile. The file transfer profile requires some functionality from the
underlying profiles and dictates the way that they should be implemented.
This thesis will also bring up the different layers in the Ericsson
Bluetooth PC Reference Stack.

The Graphical user interface (GUI) of the file transfer applications is
designed like a common FTP application. The requirements of the file
transfer application are the ability to browse a remote folder structure and
to push and pull files. The server decides if the user has read-only or read
and write permissions in the shared folders. The server also has the ability
to decide which folders a user gets access to.

The file transfer profile depends on several underlying profiles and
protocols. Two profiles handle discoverability and connection establishment.
For the transferring of files the object exchange protocol is used. This
protocol is based on the IrOBEX protocol, a protocol used for Infrared data
communication. A complete file transfer must implement all these profiles
and protocols.

The application implemented is a client/server file transfer application. It
fulfills all the mandatory requirements of the profile specification. It is
really a set of five different programs, three running on the server and two
on the client. On each there is a security application, which handles
discovery and connection establishment. There is one client and one server
application, which handle the communication and file browsing. The fifth
application is a tool to configure which files that should be shared and to
whom.