The Synchronization Profile

Synchronization is a popular data communications application and it has been one of the Bluetooth usage models since the SIG was formed. The final member of the object exchange family of profiles is the synchronization profile, or SP. The SP also builds upon the GOEP and uses the IrMC protocol to synchronize objects.

Synchronization can be considered to be a special case of object transfer in which programmatic decisions about which objects to transfer in which direction are made by synchronization software logic. The actual synchronization process can range from very simple (unidirectional pushing or pulling of a group of objects without any special treatment of those objects) to very involved (selective exchange of objects or even partial objects using principles like differencing and conflict resolution). Bluetooth synchronization as defined in the SP tends to more closely resemble the former, although application logic can be added to the basic operations of the SP to achieve more sophisticated synchronization models. Data can be synchronized between any two^[9] entities, including devices and networks.

^[9] In fact it is possible to synchronize data among more than two device, but we focus here on synchronizing between a pair of devices, which most closely matches the Bluetooth communication model.