In contrast to Classic Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is designed to provide significantly lower power consumption. This allows Android apps to communicate with BLE devices that have low power requirements, such as proximity sensors, heart rate monitors, fitness devices, and so on.
Here is a summary of key BLE terms and concepts:
Generic Attribute Profile (GATT)—The GATT profile is a general specification for sending and receiving short pieces of data known as "attributes" over a BLE link. All current Low Energy application profiles are based on GATT.
The Bluetooth SIG defines many profiles for Low Energy devices. A profile is a specification for how a device works in a particular application. Note that a device can implement more than one profile. For example, a device could contain a heart rate monitor and a battery level detector.
Attribute Protocol (ATT)—GATT is built on top of the Attribute Protocol (ATT). This is also referred to as GATT/ATT. ATT is optimized to run on BLE devices. To this end, it uses as few bytes as possible. Each attribute is uniquely identified by a Universally Unique Identifier (UUID), which is a standardized 128-bit format for a string ID used to uniquely identify information. The attributes transported by ATT are formatted as characteristics and services.
Characteristic—A characteristic contains a single value and 0-n descriptors that describe the characteristic's value. A characteristic can be thought of as a type, analogous to a class.
Descriptor—Descriptors are defined attributes that describe a characteristic value. For example, a descriptor might specify a human-readable description, an acceptable range for a characteristic's value, or a unit of measure that is specific to a characteristic's value.
Service—A service is a collection of characteristics. For example, you could have a service called "Heart Rate Monitor" that includes characteristics such as "heart rate measurement." You can find a list of existing GATT-based profiles and services on bluetooth.org.
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