Bluewave

Bluewave is a lightweight but extensible technique that allows devices to opportunistically share context when they are nearby. With Bluewave, devices upload their context to the cloud, and modify their Bluetooth friendly name to contain a URL to this information.

Context-aware applications oftentimes require devices to share information with each other in order to provide users with relevant information and services. However, current context-sharing techniques require significant amounts of setup before they can be used, making them cumbersome when devices need to share information once or spontaneously. To address this problem, we present Bluewave, a lightweight but extensible technique that allows devices to opportunistically share context when they are nearby. With Bluewave, devices upload their context to the cloud, and modify their Bluetooth friendly name to contain a URL to this information. Other devices can then scan for these links and download the context without having to know of each other or pair in advance. Bluewave provides a simple way for users to share context through their mobile devices, which is useful for applications where the environment needs to collect information about the user. Additionally, our system’s design has been guided by user feedback, and integrates privacy controls to let users manage how their context is shared. In this paper, we describe Bluewave’s architecture, and show how developers can use our system to create a wide range of context-aware applications. We argue that Bluewave’s low battery consumption, combined with its speed and compatibility with existing mobile devices, makes it preferable to comparable techniques.

This project is preparing to be submitted to EICS 2016.