Bluetooth Protocol Analyzer

Bluetooth Vanguard

The most advanced, most comprehensive Bluetooth protocol analyzer ever made. 

Building on a legacy of innovation, the Bluetooth Vanguard All-In-One Protocol Analysis System delivers new advances designed to ease the increasingly complex tasks of Bluetooth developers.

Highlights

Vanguard provides synchronized capture and analysis of BR/EDR, Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (3x3), WPAN 802.15.4 (all 16 2.4 GHz channels), raw 2.4 GHz RF spectrum analysis, HCI (USB, UART, SPI), generic SPI/UART/I2C/SWD communications, WCI-2, logic signals, and Audio I2S.

• All-in-One: concurrent capture of BR/EDR, Low Energy, Wi-Fi 11ac, WPAN 15.4, spectrum, HCI, logic, UART, SPI, I2C, SWD, Audio I2S, and WCI-2, all synchronized to nanoseconds precision

• Widely Acclaimed Software: the Ellisys software application provides intuitive understandings of complex protocol and RF behaviors, and flexible configuration and control to give engineers the insights they need

• Connection/Power Flexibility:  connect, control, and power the system locally or remotely via 1GbE (with Power-over-Ethernet/PoE) or USB 3.1 over Type-C™ (with USB Power Delivery)

• Bluetooth Wideband Capture: easy and rock-solid capture of any traffic on all channels, including discovery / connection traffic and complex topologies

• Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac (3x3) Capture: extremely accurate and perfectly synchronized Wi-Fi capture accelerated by Ellisys hardware protocol engine for best-in-class performance

• WPAN 802.15.4 Capture:  concurrent capture of all 16 WPAN 2.4 GHz channels for an unmatched coexistence analysis capability

• Emerging Features Support: thanks to the field-upgradable digital radio and the free lifetime software updates, benefit from early implementation of pre-specification feature additions

• Mesh Support: includes full support for Bluetooth Mesh network topologies

• Multi-Piconet Support: visualize all topologies, including multiple piconets and scatternets

• All Protocols and Profiles: best-of-breed protocol decoding

• Integrated Audio Analysis: listen to captured over-the-air audio, including audio over HCI and I2S, within the software, in sync with all other traffic

• Raw RF Spectrum Display: characterize the raw wireless environment and visualize coexistence issues

• Message Sequence Chart: create charts automatically from the powerful Ellisys protocol display

• Precision Timing: all captured traffic is precisely synchronized and easily measured 

• Free Maintenance: Free lifetime software updates as well as free fully-featured viewer software with unlocked hardware that can be used on any computer

Capturing wireless traffic is of course the primary aspect of Bluetooth debugging, but other information can often be just as important to fully understand the big picture.  For example, external GPIOs, HCI traffic, Wi-Fi and WPAN traffic, or raw spectrum information can all be critical to capture concurrently with the Bluetooth traffic.  This is another aspect where Ellisys sniffers truly excel.  Fully integrated hardware is a design choice, and for good reason.  This means better control of the capture characteristics across wired and wireless communications, especially timing synchronization.  The net result is that Vanguard supports one-click concurrent and tightly synchronized capture of

Features

• Bluetooth Classic (BR, EDR2, EDR3, all 79 channels concurrently)
• Bluetooth Low Energy (125k, 500k, 1M, 2Mbps, all 40 channels concurrently)
• Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (3x3, 20 / 40 / 80 MHz) [ENT]
• WPAN IEEE 802.15.4 (all 16 2.4GHz channels concurrently) [ENT]
• 2.4 GHz Spectrum Energy [PRO]
• USB HCI (1 port), UART HCI (2 ports) and SPI HCI (2 ports) [PRO]
• Generic UART, SPI, I2C and SWD [PRO]
• Logic signals [PRO]
• Audio I2S [PRO]
• Wireless Coexistence Interface 2 (WCI-2) [PRO]

Datasheet Vanguard

Reconfigurable Bluetooth Digital Radio

The reconfigurable radio concept for Bluetooth analyzers is another innovation from Ellisys engineering.  With the Bluetooth Vanguard, this cost-saving feature remains a core user benefit.  Reconfigurability means that the analyzer can be updated by software to support new features, without any change to the hardware.  For instance, this flexibility allowed for the addition of next-generation Bluetooth features such as enhanced AES security, Connectionless Broadcast, and recent features, like Coded PHY and the 2Mbps BLE speed enhancement, many months before these features were released in an updated specification..

This concept has greatly improved and accelerated the overall development cycle for Bluetooth technology.  With legacy solutions, Bluetooth engineers had to test new features with old analyzers that employed prior-generation radios, effectively an impossible task.  With the Ellisys reconfigurable Bluetooth digital radio, support for new features are available at a very early stage, well before specifications are released.  This approach helps Bluetooth radio development teams ensure proper operational characteristics well before the specification is final, and well before final spins.  This dramatically improves the quality and interoperability of Bluetooth products employing new features and speeds the development cycle.

Wi-Fi Capture using a Hardware-Accelerated Protocol Engine

With Vanguard, Wi-Fi is captured using an innovative, Ellisys-designed hardware-accelerated protocol engine.  With lower-performance Wi-Fi capture tools that use a software-based capture approach, such as that which can be done with just about any computer, the capture process is done with a processor involved.  This approach can limit the speed and timing accuracy of the capture – packets can be missed when the processor is outmatched by the incoming streams.  With Vanguard’s specially designed protocol engine, the capture is driven directly and without processor dependence to guarantee throughput and minimize latency.

All-Channels Capture of 802.15.4 WPAN

IEEE 802.15.4 is a technical standard that provides the lower-layer support of higher protocols network specifications like Thread, Zigbee, 6LoWPAN and RF4CE.  Increasingly, this Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) technology is being used on devices, modules, and SoC’s that also employ Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi..

The Bluetooth Vanguard captures all 16 WPAN channels used in the 2.4GHz band, including associated RF characteristics, all in precise synchronization with all other traffic streams captured by the analyzer.

Understanding Coexistence Issues

Wi-Fi and WPAN are common sources of interference with Bluetooth communications, as much of the spectrum used by these standards is the same as that used by Bluetooth.  To properly characterize these contentions, Vanguard provides capture of Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/AC 3x3 and WPAN in precise synchronization with all other supported wired and wireless transmissions.  

Understanding interference sources and related hardware and stack behaviors, how Bluetooth devices attempt to avoid these interferences, and the negative effects these interferences have on Bluetooth performance and interoperability is an important task for many Bluetooth engineers.  

Additionally, Wi-Fi, WPAN and Bluetooth are often co-resident on a single chip, and this design approach presents substantial test and operational challenges. Vanguard has a variety of innovative features designed to enable engineers to manage these challenges.  Understanding the timings of Wi-Fi transmissions, the timing of these transmissions relative to Bluetooth packets or wired interfaces such as HCI or discrete logic inputs, the power levels of these transmissions, and packet details, is quite important to the general task of ensuring proper radio coexistence.  

Bluetooth Mesh Networking

The Bluetooth Mesh Networking specifications define a broad spectrum of device and systemic requirements for a large-scale many-to-many network using Bluetooth Low Energy wireless technology.  Bluetooth mesh networks can greatly increase the range of Bluetooth communications by using a message relay approach and are inherently uncomplicated and inexpensive to deploy, as there are no requirements for a central router or computer.

The Bluetooth Vanguard provides support for capture, decode, and decryption of Mesh features, including a variety of mesh-specific security mechanisms and protocols.

Emerging Features Support

The reconfigurable Bluetooth analyzer is an Ellisys innovation.  All Ellisys Bluetooth analyzer systems are reconfigurable with software updates.  Ellisys maintains close relationships with radio developers worldwide and with the various technical groups involved in outlining new Bluetooth features and specifications.  This approach allows new features to be added even in the conceptual stages, long before such features become standardized in a public release of the Bluetooth specification.  This is a huge advantage to Bluetooth radio developers, and to the Bluetooth developer ecosystem in general, as radio developers can test new features well before they are committed to silicon, greatly reducing chances of re-spins or discoveries of issues in the marketplace, post-spin.  This also raises the quality aspects of general Bluetooth radio development, effectively bringing a better product to integrator companies, and in the end, better products to consumers.

Choices in Power and Control

Vanguard conveniently provides multiple choices to the user for system control and power.  Conveniently, the user can control and power Vanguard using networkable Gigabit Ethernet (1GbE) which utilizes Power over Ethernet (PoE), or USB Type-C™, which utilizes Superspeed USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5Gbps) and USB Power Delivery.  As needed, the user may also operate and power the system using an external DC supply (provided).