An Enhancement of Physical Web with Stateful BLE Beacons

In this paper, we propose a stateful enhancement of the Physical Web, which is known as an important application of the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology. We implemented a prototype system consisting of a BLE central and peripherals (i.e., BLE beacon) implemented in Android devices, and an external server written in PHP and PostgreSQL. If the state is stored in the BLE beacon, the prototype system takes 1.0 sec longer to acquire the desired Web page than the normal implementation without state, and if the state is stored in the external server, the response time increased by about 1.0 sec, while it depends on the location of the external server in the network.