CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION

This application claims the benefit of Japanese Patent Application No. 2018-187684, filed on Oct. 2, 2018, the entire disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein.

FIELD

Technical field relates to a wireless communication apparatus, a wireless communication method, and a storage medium.

BACKGROUND

Bluetooth (registered trademark) low energy (BLE) is one short range wireless communication standard, and is known heretofore for use in establishing a connection between a slave device and a master device by the slave device broadcasting an advertising packet intermittently at a prescribed period in order for the master device to discover the slave device, as for example, in Unexamined Japanese Patent Application Kokai Publication No. 2012-142877.

Although heretofore a maximum of 31 bytes of advertising data can be placed in the advertising packet according to BLE (predating Bluetooth (registered trademark) 5), according to Bluetooth (registered trademark) 5 released in December of 2016, use of periodic advertising of an extended advertising packet (packet on a secondary advertising channel) is enabled, and thus broadcast transmission at intervals of a larger capacity of data is enabled by use of this extended advertising packet. For example, a maximum of about 20 Mbyte (2 Mbit×81.91875 seconds÷8=20.4796875 Mbyte) of data can be broadcast when using the low energy (LE) 2M physical layer (PHY) standard.

However, to receive the periodic advertising of the extended advertising packet, firstly the receiving side is to receive an ADV_EXT_IND advertising packet (packet of a primary advertising channel) that has compatibility with previously-existing BLE. Then although the frequency of transmission by periodic advertising can be set in a range of 7.5 milliseconds to 81.91875 seconds, the transmitting side transmits the advertising packet ADV_EXT_IND and the periodic advertising continuing thereafter at this frequency. Therefore, opportunities become infrequent for enabling reception of the advertising packet ADV_EXT_IND for the receiving side to receive the periodic advertising at this long frequency, and thus such operation suffers from lowering of the possibility that the periodic advertising can be received. For example, when this interval is set to 10 seconds, only one opportunity for receiving the advertising packet ADV_EXT_IND occurs in 10 seconds.

SUMMARY

A wireless communication apparatus according to a first aspect of the present disclosure includes (i) a wireless communicator capable of broadcasting an extended advertising packet of a large transmittable capacity and a compatible advertising packet having a smaller transmittable capacity than the extended advertising packet; and (ii) a processor. The wireless communicator broadcasts periodically the extended, advertising packet based on an instruction from the processor. The processor sets offset information for acquiring of a time at which the extended advertising packet is receivable in an offset notification packet that is the compatible advertising packet, and broadcasts the offset notification packet via the wireless communicator. The offset information is set based on a transmission timing of the offset notification packet and a transmission timing of the extended advertising packet.

A wireless communication apparatus according to a second aspect for achieving the aforementioned objective includes (i) a wireless communicator capable of receiving an extended advertising packet of a large transmittable capacity and a compatible advertising packet having a smaller transmittable capacity than the extended advertising packet, and (ii) a processor. The processor, via the wireless communicator, receives an offset notification packet that is the compatible advertising packet including offset information for acquiring a time at which the extended advertising packet is receivable, and receives the extended advertising packet via the wireless communicator based on the offset information included in the received offset notification packet.

