Dynamic Reconfigurable Wireless Connection between Smartphone and Gateway

In a broad sense, the Internet of Things (IoT) includes devices that do not have Internet access capability but are aided by a gateway (such as a smartphone) that does have such access. The combination of a gateway and devices with a wireless connection can provide flexibility, but there are limitations to the network capability of each gateway in terms of how many network connections can be accommodated. It would be possible to get rid of the constraint and provide further flexibility and stability if we could deal with multiple gateways and balance the connections. Therefore, we propose a dynamic reconfigurable wireless connection system that can hand over the device connection between gateways by introducing a driver management framework that migrates the driver module handling the network connection. We have implemented a prototype using smartphones as gateways, Bluetooth low energy (BLE) sensors as devices, and a Web application that works on an extended Web runtime that can directly control a device from the application. The combination of these, composed by the user, can be migrated from the smartphone to other gateways (including the network connection) by dragging and dropping icons, after which the gateway and devices take over the combined task. We confirmed that the proposed architecture enables end users to utilize devices flexibly and can easily migrate the network connections of a particular service to another gateway.