Integrating Handhelds into Environments of Cooperating Smart Everyday Objects

Because of their severe resource-restrictions and limited user interfaces, smart everyday objects must often rely on remote resources to realize their services. This paper shows how smart objects can obtain access to such resources by spontaneously exploiting the capabilities of nearby mobile user devices. In our concept, handhelds join a distributed data structure shared by cooperating smart objects, which makes the location where data are stored transparent for applications. Smart objects then outsource computations to handhelds and thereby gain access to their resources. As a result, this allows smart items to transfer a graphical user interface to a nearby handheld, and facilitates the collaborative processing of sensory data because of the more elaborate storage and processing capabilities of mobile user devices. We present a concrete implementation of our concepts on an embedded sensor node platform, the BTnodes, and illustrate the applicability of our approach with two example applications.