In this and the following chapter we look at how to get the best out of short-range wireless technology. These two chapters focus on the items of a specification a designer can influence within the constraints of each standard and how those constraints may direct the choice of standard. In many cases, these are the same techniques for all of the standards covered in the preceding chapters.

Back in Chapter 2, I talked about the three key differences you need to understand between a cable and a wireless link:

• Working out what your wireless unit is connected to,

• The fact that latency becomes a major factor, as information may not arrive at the far end of the link when you expect it to, and

• Throughput varies in what can appear to be a random manner.

In this chapter I'll concentrate on how these three issues can be addressed and how they might affect your choice of standard, before progressing to ways of ensuring you get the best performance out of that choice.

A standard should be regarded as a well tried basic framework that provides the advantages of interoperability, reduced cost and faster time to market. Anyone who has used short-range wireless will know that within that framework there are many different possible implementations of each standard, each of which can radically affect the way they perform and how they are fitted to the use case.