A communications system is arranged for serially chaining multiple portable pendant peripherals to a portable host device. The system enables multiple low power input/output peripherals to communicate over a bi-directional data line with a portable host device such as a PDA or cellular phone. Fixed-length data packets are employed in a store-and-forward approach between the host device and the pendant peripherals. An upstream pendant system component controls a unidirectional clock signal that regulates data transfers to or from the host device and a downstream pendant peripheral. A device identification field associated with the data packet is incremented or decremented as the data packet is forwarded along the pendant bus chain until it reaches its destination.