The Bluetooth SIG presented Bluetooth 5.1 on 21 January 2019.
The major areas of improvement are:
- Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD) which are used for locating and tracking of devices
- Advertising Channel Index
- GATT Caching
- Minor Enhancements batch 1:
- HCI support for debug keys in LE Secure Connections
- Sleep clock accuracy update mechanism
- ADI field in scan response data
- Interaction between QoS and Flow Specification
- Block Host channel classification for secondary advertising
- Allow the SID to appear in scan response reports
- Specify the behavior when rules are violated
- Periodic Advertising Sync Transfer
Features Added in Core Specification Addendum (CSA) 6 – Integrated in v5.1:
- Models
- Mesh-based model hierarchy
The following features were removed in this version of the specification:
- Unit keys