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OPEN ARCHITECTURE

There are several ways in which third parties can add value to the stack.

Third-party PC hardware needs an HCI transport driver to work with the Intel stack. Such a driver will interface with the HCI driver and would be responsible for communicating with the hardware to deliver HCI commands from the PC and to return HCI events and data back to the PC.

Third-party kernel-mode client drivers are layered above the RFBD. These drivers handle devices external to the PC that communicate with the PC using Bluetooth protocols. The main goal for these drivers is to enable custom handling of the hardware in a way that best uses innovative features in the hardware while still retaining the Bluetooth SIG standard over the air interface. Bluetooth Plug and Play (explained below) is used to load these custom drivers on RFBD.

Third-party user-mode applications are also enabled on the stack to enable custom handling of device or Bluetooth UI. These applications interface to the stack by using BTAPI for functionality specific to the Bluetooth technology and by using standard Microsoft APIs (such as the Win32 comm API*) for data transfers.

These third-party applications can be independent applications or they can be launched from within the Intel UI. An application that falls in the latter category is the file transfer application (when a file is dragged and dropped, for example).

Third-party user-mode applications can also be layered on third-party kernel-mode client drivers. This happens when the kernel-mode drivers export an API that is used by the user-mode applications.