Symbolic device for short-range wireless pairwise communication

Laptop computers and cellular phones often have the capability for short-range wireless communication such as adhoc mode in wireless LAN and Bluetooth. However, the use of the capability is limited due to the lack of consideration for shortrange communications in conventional communication protocols; i.e., an unnatural and troublesome procedure is required to specify targets especially within a nearby area. In this paper, we propose a symbolic device to support short-range wireless communications that provides the ability to specify a target on the real-world environment. More specifically, a short-range communication device is logically concerned with its corresponding symbolic device and the short-range communication with a target is established by linking the symbol device with the target directly or indirectly. Furthermore, we designed and implemented a prototype system for the proposed device using wired and wireless LAN.