Using visual tags to bypass Bluetooth device discovery.-One factor that has limited the use of Bluetooth as a networking technology for publicly

accessible mobile services is the way in which it handles Device Discovery. Establishing

a Bluetooth connection between two devices that have not seen each other before is slow

and, from a usability perspective, often awkward. In this paper we present the



implementation

of an end-to-end Bluetooth-based mobile service framework designed specifically to

address this issue. Rather than using the standard Bluetooth Device Discovery model to

detect nearby mobile services, our system relies on machine-readable visual tags for outof-

band device and service selection. Our work is motivated by the recent proliferation of

cameraphones and PDAs with built-in cameras. We have implemented the described framework

completely for Nokia Series 60 cameraphones and demonstrated that our tag-based

connection-establishment technique (i) offers order of magnitude time improvements over

the standard Bluet