IrDA Principles and Protocols

Standards from the Infrared Data Association today permit tens of millions of users to easily beam items between handheld devices. Professionals beam business cards from PDA to cell phone. School children wirelessly exchange games at recess. Shoppers make purchases at grocery stores by pointing a handheld device at point of sale terminal. The “point and shoot” ease of IrDA technology has made the small dark plastic window an ubiquitous feature on devices of all kinds, including laptops, cell phones, PDAs, printers, wristwatches and digital cameras.

This is the definitive book on the standards of the Infrared Data Association, providing an accessible overview of the technology for novices, while delivering the most relevant technical details for experts. This book is an excellent resource for your IrDA library, and makes a great gift for your clients, product managers, technical and marketing staff.
You’ll find many of the answers you’re looking for in this volume, whether you’re…

  • …a manager looking for a convenient executive overview of the IrDA technology,
  • …an engineer getting ready to implement an IrDA protocol stack,
  • …an integrator who wants to put infrared technology in a product,
  • …a software developer who wants to write IrDA-enabled applications, or
  • …just a user who wants to understand how to get IrDA to work better on your device.

Specific Topics Include:

  • The motivation and usage models that underlie the IrDA standards
  • A history of the Infrared Data Association
  • A discussion of the most recent efforts currently underway in IrDA
  • A description of the core IrDA protocol layers including:
    • The infrared physical layer
    • Controllers, drivers and framers
    • IrLAP: The IrDA Link Access Protocol
    • IrLMP: The IrDA Link Management Protocol
    • TinyTP: The IrDA Tiny transport Protocol
    • IAS: The IrDA Information Access Service
    • IrDA Lite strategies
  • A description of important session layer protocols including:
    • IrCOMM and IrLPT: Legacy support for serial and parallel communications
    • IrOBEX: IrDA Object Exchange
    • IrFM: Infrared Financial Message exchange