Supporting an Ephemeral Shared Dataspace with a BLE Connectionless Protocol
摘要
Smart devices would often communicate with other entities in their surroundings, to engage an interaction or get information about the environment. For example, a blind person may want her smartwatch advertising about her disability so that the environment adapts. Short distance wireless communications, such as BLE are a good support for this style of short-lived and immediate communications. However, building applications using these communication interfaces are not so easy as the protocols involved are typically packet level messages, and higher level middleware such as message buses or event based systems are designed in the context of general networking, not “spontaneous” communication system. This paper proposes a higher level protocol to better support ephemeral interactions at the application level, based on a shared data space. The proposed framework allows anonymous communication among nodes, reflects their physical context to the application, while not depending on MAC addressing. It is based on the idea of having the data addressable while it is relevant. We propose a generic packet structure that accommodates different roles and application fields. BLE Connectionless mode is used to transmit data. The system is implemented on ESP32 where multiple application fields are demonstrated to fit under the proposed communication paradigm.