A J2ME transparent middleware to support HTTP connections over Bluetooth

Over the last years, a call for embedding computation into the environment has been arisen. This philosophy has been often referred to as pervasive or ubiquitous computing, to remark the aim to a dense and widespread interaction among computing devices. User intervention and awareness are discarded, in opposition to an automatic adaptation of applications to location and context. To this aim, much attention is drawn to technologies supporting dynamicity and mobility over small devices which can follow the user anytime, anywhere. The Bluetooth standard particularly fits this idea, by providing a versatile and flexible wireless network technology with low power consumption. Operating in a license-free frequency, users are not charged for accessing the network nor they need an account with any company. Bluetooth dynamically sets up and manages evolving networks, by providing the possibility of automatically discovering devices and services within its transmission range. Research studies have forecasted that within a few years, most of the devices accessing the Web will be mobile, and presumably most of them will be Bluetooth-enabled. Therefore, we need solutions that encompass networking, systems, and application issues involved in realizing mobile and ubiquitous access to services. In this paper, we present a transparent middleware which extends the possibility of accessing Web resources also from Bluetooth-enabled smartphones. All the implementation details will be hidden both to users and to application developers, allowing an easy and complete portability of applications working on traditional TCP/IP communication protocols towards the Bluetooth technology.