For the Bluetooth Low Energy stack, according to Bluetooth 4.0 a special set of profiles applies.Ī host Operating System can expose a basic set of profiles (namely OBEX, HID and Audio Sink) and manufacturers can add additional profiles to its driver and stack to enhance what their Bluetooth device can do. The profiles provide standards that manufacturers follow to allow devices to use Bluetooth in the intended manner. The way a device uses Bluetooth depends on its profile capabilities. For example, there are Hands-Free Profile (HFP) 1.5 implementations using both Bluetooth 2.0 and Bluetooth 1.2 core specifications.
While the profile may use certain features of the core specification, specific versions of profiles are rarely tied to specific versions of the core specification, making them independent of each other. It resides on top of the Bluetooth Core Specification and (optionally) additional protocols. A Bluetooth profile is a specification regarding an aspect of Bluetooth-based wireless communication between devices.
In order to use Bluetooth, a device must be compatible with the subset of Bluetooth profiles (often called services or functions) necessary to use the desired services.
