Kouichi Yasaki

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.