Novel Bluetooth Sniffer Test-Bed for Analyzing Real World Networks

Abstract

Bluetooth has solidified its status as one of the most prominent and versatile wireless communication technologies alongside Wi-Fi. In spite of its widespread usage, contemporary Bluetooth testing technology still has many unaddressed shortcomings and issues. Hardware limitations, computational complexity, and the lack of standardization are some of these longstanding problems. Furthermore, very few systems possess a proven and reliable capability to test both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. This paper presents the development of an adaptive Bluetooth test-bed framework that can not only overcome limitations with existing systems but can accommodate other technologies and protocols as well. The work presented in this paper includes: a packet processing and logging utility, a promiscuous packet capture subsystem built around a production test engine, and a complementary subsystem that handles encryption and other security mechanisms.

Keywords

• Radio communication
• wireless communication
• Bluetooth
• BLE
• sniffer
• packet capture