Bluetooth PAN Profile

The Bluetooth Personal Area Networking (PAN) profile provides a simplification over the LAN Access and Dial-up Networking profiles (both now deprecated) by reducing the number of layers in a network connection.

In this overview

You will learn about the Bluetooth PAN Profile API.

PAN is provided to enable simple networking over a Bluetooth device by creating or joining piconets. To facilitate this adhoc networking the PAN Profile defines three possible participant device roles, they are:

• PANU - the User,

• PAN-GN - Group Ad-hoc Networking, and

• PAN-NAP - Network Access Point.

Both PANU and GN are implemented as part of the Symbian OS Bluetooth subsystem but the NAP role has been omitted. Although Symbian devices can not act in the PAN-NAP role they can connect to other devices acting in that role, thereby giving Symbian devices acting in the PANU or PAN-GN role access to the networking capabilities of a network access point.

PAN is integrated into the networking framework as a plugin. Therefore applications can treat Bluetooth PAN as any other networking technology. See the Networking documentation for more information about networking with the Bluetooth PAN profile plugin.