Pandora APIs

Pandora Bluetooth test interfaces provide a common abstraction for Bluetooth testing tools to interact with all Bluetooth implementations, exposing all standard Bluetooth capabilities over gRPC.

While all Bluetooth stacks are different in their supported profiles, features, and corresponding APIs, the goal of Pandora is to provide a set of unified test interfaces which they could all implement, so testing tools can be reused and scaled across the entire Bluetooth ecosystem.

Requirements

Since each Bluetooth stack exposes different APIs, the test interfaces must be generic enough and must not rely on any implementation specific behavior. However, they must ensure that they provide all the necessary access to the existing testing tools. For this reason, the test interfaces are co-designed by multiple teams at Google.

The test interfaces must be implemented using gRPC services and must use protocol buffers as Interface Definition Language (IDL). A Bluetooth stack under test exposing such interfaces must thus implement a gRPC server.

The test interfaces definition must follow the Pandora style guide.

Abstraction level

A test interface is defined for each Bluetooth profile (standard or custom). This allows the Bluetooth stack under test to implement only the test interfaces corresponding to its supported profiles. Additional platform/device-specific interfaces may also be added if necessary (but should be avoided as much as possible).

The same test interface can be implemented at different levels of a same stack: for example, in Android, the Pandora Bluetooth test interfaces can be implemented both on top of Topshim (which is a Rust shim layer just on top of the native stack), which is advantageous as tests running at that level can apply to ChromeOS as well as Android, or on top of the Android Bluetooth SDK (Java) which is advantageous for Android, since the Bluetooth module includes both the native stack and the SDK.

Optional features

As Bluetooth profiles contain optional features, some methods of the test interfaces might not be implementable by a specific Bluetooth stack.

Such unimplemented methods must return an UNIMPLEMENTED status code as defined by gRPC.

Discovering which features are supported by a Bluetooth stack is not (yet) part of the test interfaces as this is already doable via Bluetooth SIG Implementation Conformance Statements (ICS).