Applications


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BlueDrekar Wireless Project

Bluetooth Wireless Application Development

Projects

- WebSplitter
- BlueWeb
- LAN Access Point
- Internet on Wheels
- Smart Shopping
- Smart Wireless Controller
- TunnelMagic

WebSplitter

BlueWeb

In the current content interaction and application models, the user Internet experience is mostly based on using a single device. In fact, most pervasive computing and portable devices have specialized capabilities and the emerging trend is towards smaller and more lightweight models that the user can carry and operate anytime, anywhere. However, every device is designed for presentation and delivery of a specific type of content.
This being low resolution data in the case of a PDA, combined with voice in a smart phone or a simple headset for voice/sound interactions. With the existing trend in every user carrying more than one such device, Bluetooth wireless technology enables a much richer Internet user experience by establishing a personal area network between devices and enabling the web/application content distribution and interaction over a multiplicity of devices. The deployment of Bluetooth wireless technology makes it possible to modify the current application model. WebSplitter makes use of this collaboration capabilities introduced by Bluetooth wireless technology into portable devices. With Websplitter, rather than confining the output results of an information query to the lone requesting mobile device, the output paradigm for mobile networked devices is extended to permit these devices to utilize the multimedia output capabilities of other networked devices, both mobile and fixed. For example, a wireless PDA that lacks audio output is enabled by the WebSplitter application to exploit a stereo speaker with Bluetooth wireless technology in the vicinity for playback of the audio component of each downloaded Web page. Similarly, if there is a projection display in the room, then the WebSplitter application enables the PDA to redirect part of the output of its Web browsing session onto the large display. In addition, WebSplitter may send a transcoded version of each Web page to the PDA for remote control purposes. The figure below illustrates a home scenario where the web document is sent to a network enabled display so that a group of people can easily watch at the same time. The audio is sent
to the networked speakers and a outline of the page is sent to the PDA with Bluetooth wireless radio module for remote control. The Websplitter enables multiple
devices and multiple users to collaborate and jointly share the whole output or part of the output of a Web browsing session.

As pervasive computing devices start to dominate the world of personal information devices and the services offered and accessed by such devices explode in a see of digital information, the device and service discovery technologies become an area of paramount importance in networking and mobile computing. A prerequisite to this paradigm where information appliances, smart spaces, and personal computing and communication devices dominate the set of networked devices on the Internet is solving the problem of defining, exporting, accessing services and associated devices in a ubiquitous way. On key difficulty in this area is that today we have a number of different device and service discovery technologies that are designed for specific
networking protocols, specific link and connectivity technologies or even operating environments. As a result the service provisioning or access might be limited to their intended scope.

The BlueWeb project aims at unifying different and diverse device and service discovery technologies such as SLP, Bluetooth SDP, Jini, etc. under a common API in order to make different device and service discovery technologies universally available. The objective of this project is to develop middleware, API and networking infrastructure technologies in order to be able to discover devices and services independently from the underlying protocols. Issues such as UI portability, service discovery abstraction and mapping between dissimilar protocols are being studied and explored.

TunnelMagic

With the emergence of ubiquitous short range wireless connectivity solutions such Bluetooth, it is envisionable in the future that all kind devices, from computers to thermometers, will get network connected. Enabling networking connectivity for all kind devices has numerous advantages such as remote access, device sharing, and composing new functions through use of multiple devices with well defined specific functions.

Before having an integrated networking solution in all kind of devices, however, we need an intermediate step in which already existing devices which has some sort of communication capability but does not have a complete networking support be able to get connected to the network as well. Today, a lot devices on market, such as digital cameras, video cameras, printers usually have communication capability through I/O ports such as serial (RS-232), parallel, or USB ports.

We propose the use of tunneling the traffic of these different I/O ports over the network in order to reach these devices remotely and have multiple users access to them. We can also pipe the traffic of the devices from one device to the other one and thereby enable new functionalities very easily. Our approach requires tunnel agents to be deployed in a dynamic fashion to the points on the network where these devices may be connected through simple I/O interfaces. Service discovery protocols will be used to discover and configure these tunnel agents on the fly and to use their services over the network.