Design and Validation of a Low-Power Network Node for Pervasive Applications

Pervasive computing refers to making many computing devices available throughout the physical environment, while making them effectively invisible to the user. To further increase the applicability of ubiquitous computing, minimizing energy consumption and hardware cost are mandatory in real world applications. In this paper the authors present their platform prototype for ubiquitous computing, which has been implemented based on commercial Bluetooth off-the shelf components. It allows every object to be augmented with processing and communication capabilities in order to make them "Smart". They validate their proposal by evaluating the tradeoff between power consumption and performance for their experimental prototype. Their prototype has been used in a museum application to support ubiquitous computing between devices without requiring a priori knowledge of each other.