Graduation Semester and Year

2015

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Yonghe Liu

Abstract

The power of the Internet is penetrating into the physical world with ever increasing speed and expanding reach under the general concept of Internet of Things. Extensive sets of efforts have been devoted toward establishing an interconnected network of smart devices in a self-organized manner. Nowadays, using low power beacons to announce the presences of physical objects has gained tremendous momentum exemplified by iBeacon from Apple. Unfortunately, schemes like iBeacon use abstract codes to denote a physical entity, limiting it to be only understandable by those with knowledge of it beforehand. In this thesis, we develop an open architecture where a beacon will announce a URL representing the presence of the corresponding object in the proximity and a pointer for related information. By employing URL instead of an abstract code as in iBeacon, the architecture provides a flexible and powerful way of representing physical entities in an open manner. We implement the URL beacon broadcasting based on Bluetooth Low Energy using Texas Instruments' Sensortag nodes. We further implement a ranking scheme for the URL received by a smart device from the beacons around by based on a variety of metrics including signal strength, URL content, and user history.

Disciplines

Computer Sciences | Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Comments

Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington

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