Supporting Localized Interactions among Heterogeneous Smart Things with ThingWare

The development of ubiquitous computing has witnessed the invention of various smart things (or smart objects), which normally refer to conventional devices equipped with sensing, computing, and communication capabilities. Programming with smart things faces many challenges because they are mobile, dynamic, and heterogeneous. This paper proposes ThingAPI as a uniform programming abstraction to support efficient programming with heterogeneous smart things. ThingAPI tries to accomplish two objectives: making local smart things interactive, and making heterogeneous smart things easily programmable. ThingAPI allows applications on smart things to interact with a wide range of things and flexibly extend their functionalities. We have built a lightweight middleware prototype, ThingWare, to implement ThingAPI over several platforms. With ThingWare, we can easily program household and office appliances such as TV sets, air-conditioners, projectors, etc. To demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of our approach, we construct a representative application and present detailed analysis of various performance results.