IrDA Principles and Protocols: The IrDA Library, Vol. 1

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.

IrDA Principles and Protocols is the first 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. 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

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
…a user who wants to understand how to get IrDA to work better on your device,

This volume has the answers you're looking for.

Charles D. Knutson is Director of the Mobile Computing Lab and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He served as the Chair of the Test and Interoperability Committee of the Infrared Data Association for several years, and is currently a member of the IrDA Architecture Council. Dr. Knutson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University plus B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from BYU. He has held engineering and management positions at corporations including Hewlett-Packard, Novell, Extended Systems, and Counterpoint Systems Foundry. Dr. Knutson is a popular speaker at the annual Embedded Systems Conference. His articles have appeared in Portable Design Magazine, Communication Systems Design, Embedded Systems Programming, Byte, PC Computing, InfoWorld, and other industry and academic publications.