Declaring Bluetooth Peripheral Role Support for Windows

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Bluetooth Blog articles.

In this post, we will define how Windows will declare support for Peripheral Role. Acting as a peripheral enables a lot of functionality for a user but in order to ensure that Central Role scenarios continue to function, Windows has additional requirements to ensure that Peripheral and Central Roles can coexist simultaneously.


To officially support Peripheral Role on Windows, a Bluetooth radio needs to support a subset of the available LE_States defined in the Bluetooth 5.1 spec (7.8.27 LE Read Supported States command).


Peripheral Role support on Windows is defined by supporting not only the Peripheral Role LE states, but also the states when the host PC would be in both the Central and Peripheral roles.


Supporting both the Central and Peripheral Roles at the same time shall be referred to as “Link Layer Topology” or “LE Scatternet support”.


There are two sets of states that need to be supported; the critical set and the set to declare peripheral role support.

If the radio does not support the:

  • Critical states
    • We will disable LE functionality, and BR/EDR would continue to function
    • Critical States/Bits Needed: [0-22] && [24-28]
  • States for Peripheral Role or LE Scatternet support
    • Peripheral Role on Windows will not be supported
    • Peripheral Role States/Bits Needed: [32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 41]

Hex value when the minimum bit mask for both critical states and Peripheral Role states are supported:

  • 2DB1F7FFFFF‬

Note: Declaring support for these states will also need to be validated by the Bluetooth SIG’s qualification tests for your product

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