A Bluetooth-Based JXME Infrastructure

Over the last years, research efforts have led the way to embed computation into the environment. Much attention is drawn to technologies supporting dynamicity and mobility over small devices which can follow the user anytime, anywhere. The Bluetooth standard particularly fits this idea, by providing a versatile and flexible wireless network technology with low power consumption. In this paper, we describe an implementation of a novel framework named JXBT (JXME over Bluetooth), which allows the JXME infrastructure to use Bluetooth as the communication channel. By exploiting the JXME functionalities we can overcome Bluetooth limitations, such as the maximum number of interconnectable devices (7 according to the Bluetooth standard) and the maximum transmission range (10 or 100 meters depending on the version). To test the lightness of JXBT, we designed and evaluated BlueIRC, an application running on top of JXBT. This application enables the set up of a chat among Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices, without requiring them to be within transmission range.