Kazuaki Nimura

Dynamic connection management between Web apps and peripheral devices by Web driver

Many people carry smartphones and tablets with them on a daily basis and are constantly connected via wireless. As the Internet of Things (IoT) comes of age, people increasingly want to use various devices in the surrounding environment in conjunction with their smartphones. The cost of developing services that cooperate with the devices is high because various kinds of devices exist and multiple OSs for smartphones need to be supported. To mitigate the issue, we propose a dynamic device connection method that can connect services (e.g. Web applications) with devices located close to users by installing the device drivers and/or protocol adapters dynamically. Developers can create new Web applications easily because the device drivers absorb the differences of the devices and provide a common Web interface for them. The protocol adapters provide access capability to OS application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web technology. We implemented the proposed method on an Android smartphone and evaluated it with Bluetooth Low Energy devices and a Classic Bluetooth device. Results showed that the method absorbs the difference of function and protocol and delivers a reasonable performance.

Customizable Web-Based System to Federate Smart Devices and Peripherals

Smart devices such as smartphones and tablets are increasingly essential tools to make our lives more convenient. Wearable devices and ambient devices are also getting popular and can easily access the Internet through smart devices. Although smart devices have incredibly advanced functionalities, their I/O is poor because of their small size. Peripherals are able to compensate for the shortcomings, but currently there is no unified methodology to gather and integrate given devices. We have developed a customizable Web-based system in which services in the Cloud can federate smart devices and peripherals. The proposed system uses Web based technologies to coordinate between cloud services and the devices at hand. The main benefit is that Web application developers can create an entire system since the configuration and operation of all devices are describable only in JavaScript. We have also separated the device functionality from the application logic, thus enabling parallel development. We implemented a prototype system using Bluetooth low energy (BLE) and found that it could be easily used to develop a system that emulates a POS terminal. The proposed architecture enables developers to flexibly utilize the Web of Things.

Dynamically Exposing and Controlling Physical Devices by Expanding Web of Things Scheme

The market of the Internet of Things (IoT) is growing rapidly, and people will obtain even more benefits from the services that handle the composed IoT devices through cloud services in the future. The World Wide Web Consortium pursues dealing with IoT devices on Web layers, called the Web of things (WoT). Applications can access the functions of things anytime, anywhere by exposing things through Web services on the cloud because Web technology already achieves enormous Web services all over the world and is easy to handle for developers. Providing practical Web services of things requires synchronizing with the changes in the real world, and an application to access things has to modify its user interface depending on the synchronized Web services. In this paper, we propose an approach that allows exposing things dynamically by recognizing accessible device functions and by managing them on the cloud using a WoT-based API. The user interface of the application can automatically be adjusted according to the change in the Web API so that the devices can be well controlled. In addition, we implemented the platform and found that it works properly on actual use cases. The feasibility is demonstrated in measurements of the performance.

Dynamic Reconfigurable Wireless Connection between Smartphone and Gateway

In a broad sense, the Internet of Things (IoT) includes devices that do not have Internet access capability but are aided by a gateway (such as a smartphone) that does have such access. The combination of a gateway and devices with a wireless connection can provide flexibility, but there are limitations to the network capability of each gateway in terms of how many network connections can be accommodated. It would be possible to get rid of the constraint and provide further flexibility and stability if we could deal with multiple gateways and balance the connections. Therefore, we propose a dynamic reconfigurable wireless connection system that can hand over the device connection between gateways by introducing a driver management framework that migrates the driver module handling the network connection. We have implemented a prototype using smartphones as gateways, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensors as devices, and a Web application that works on an extended Web runtime that can directly control a device from the application. The combination of these, composed by the user, can be migrated from the smartphone to other gateways (including the network connection) by dragging and dropping icons, after which the gateway and devices take over the combined task. We confirmed that the proposed architecture enables end users to utilize devices flexibly and can easily migrate the network connections of a particular service to another gateway.

Implementation of Transparent Network Subsystem for PC Manageability

By adding a subsystem that provides continuous network service to a host system such as a PC (Personal Computer), even while the host system is sleeping, it is possible to achieve efficient use of the system and energy reduction. Remote management is a typical example. Recently, to maintain network service anytime and anywhere, WWAN (Wireless Wide Area Network) technology such as 3G (3rd generation mobile telecommunications) has been employed. The design of the subsystem should be independent of the network device in terms of development cost because once modifications are made, they are dependent on a network device, this would lead to extra work being required to use the new network devices and retain the modification. Furthermore, modification to the logic or firmware of a wireless network device may make re-certification necessary owing to rules and regulations for radio devices. Therefore, realization of a method that does not require any modification to wireless network devices, network drivers, and connection software is considered ideal, however, it has not been achieved thus far. In this paper, we propose a unique architecture for a subsystem that overcomes this design issue by introducing two elements to achieve host unaware network service: pseudoresponse and bridge functionality for communicating through the subsystem. In general, a highly independent design contributes to processing overhead and tends to degrade performance. Hence, we prototype the subsystem on an ARM7 board and evaluate it using actual 3G network and cloud services. The results show that the proposed technique works transparently, even when the host system uses the network, and the required CPU (Central Processing Unit) frequency is more than 70 MHz. Furthermore, it is confirmed that power reduction of around 60% can be achieved while downloading.