The Design and Implementation of a BLE-based WebD2D Service for Android Smartphone

Transcription

1 , pp The Design and Implementation of a BLE-based WebD2D Service for Android Smartphone Do-Hyung Kim 1, Seok-Jin Yoon 1, Hyung-Seok Lee 1 and Jae-Ho Lee 1 1 Embedded System Research Group, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, Daejeon, Korea { kimdh, sjyoon, hyslee, bigleap}@etri.re.kr Abstract. Recently, web browser has become the one of the main tools for getting information from Internet. People increasingly want to share the content of their web browsers with their acquaintances. This paper describes the design and implementation of a BLE-based WebD2D service for android smartphone. WebD2D has features to send the content of a web browser to other applications on a device. We implemented WebD2D features in an open sourcebased mobile web browser. To verify WebD2D features, we implemented a reference service which helps people to share the current URL of their web browsers with nearby people simultaneously using BLE on their smartphones. With the service, we verified that WebD2D features are working correctly without any problems. And we convinced that WebD2D feature will increase the usability of web browsers. In the future, we will upgrade WebD2D features and extend them to Linux-based devices such as set-top box. Keywords: WebD2D, HighWeb, BLE, URL 1 Introduction Nowadays, web browser has become the one of the main tools for gathering information from the mobile internet. People frequently use their web browsers to send s, search news and get various information. With the widespread use of smartphones, this trend is expected to increase further in the future. Some web browsers have a feature for sharing content with other applications. For example, people can send the content of current web page to other people using SNS and on their smartphones. This feature is very useful when people want to share the content of the web page directly. However, this feature has some drawbacks. To share the content, people should know other people s or SNS information beforehand. And furthermore, in a meeting room, it may be necessary to share the content with multiple people at the same time. In this paper, we describes the design and implementation of a BLE-based WebD2D service for android smartphone which supports direct content sharing with nearby people at the same time. ISSN: ASTL Copyright 2017 SERSC

2 2 The WebD2D Architecture 2.1 The Functional Flow WebD2D provides features for sending the content of a web browser to other applications on an android smartphone. Fig.1 briefly shows the functional flow of WebD2D. As shown in Fig.1, a JavaScript which runs on a web browser sends content to a web browser and then the web browser delivers the content to external applications. In other words, when people send sharing content from their web browsers with a JavaScript, the content was delivered to the internal of the web browser and then transmitted to external applications. Fig. 1. The functional flow of WebD2D 2.2 JavaScript Interfaces The three WebD2D JavaScript interfaces are shown in Table 1. The upper two interfaces check sharing content type and validity. The last one sends sharing content to a web browser. We will add more JavaScript interfaces in the future. Table 1. The JavaScript Interfaces Name webd2d_cmd_send webd2d_bleurl_cmd_send webd2d_send Description check sharing content type check BLE URL validity send webd2d content to a web browser 2.3 WebD2D Broadcast Receiver Fig. 2 briefly shows the structure of a WebD2D broadcast receiver for an android application which receives the sharing content from a web browser. For receiving the sharing content, the application has to register web2app.send intent filter into its AndroidManifest.xml. And, a WebD2D receiver class must be defined in the application. The WebD2D receiver analyzes the incoming content and then start a main activity of the application with parsed information. 2 Copyright 2017 SERSC

3 Fig. 2. The structure of a WebD2D broadcast receiver 3 Implementation 3.1 WebD2D features for Web Browser We implemented WebD2D features in an open-source chromium web browser and we named it HighWeb browser [1]. As shown in Fig. 3, a JavaScript send sharing content to the render process of a web browser and then it delivers the content to the browser process using IPC. Then, the browser process transmit the content to the Java with JNI. Finally, the Java broadcasts the content to external applications on the android device. Fig. 3. The webd2d interface of a web browser 3.2 The Structure of WebD2D Service We implemented a WebD2D service on an android smartphone. The service helps people to share the current URL of their web browsers with nearby other people simultaneously. It works with WebD2D features of web browser and BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) [2] on the device. Fig.4 shows the functional structure of the WebD2D service. Copyright 2017 SERSC 3

4 Fig. 4. The function structure of WebD2D service The WebD2D service consists of a sender device part and a receiver device part. In the sender part, the URL is delivered to a BLE URL Advertiser application from a web browser using WebD2D features. Then, a WebD2D receiver of the application checks if the URL is valid. And then, the length of the URL is shortened by URL Shortener function because of the limitation of BLE data packet size [3, 4]. Finally, the URL is broadcasted to a nearby device by BLE beacons on the device. In the receiver part, a URL Checker of a BLE URL Receiver application periodically checks if the URL is received on the device. When it founds the URL, a URL Notifier of the application displays an URL notification sign on the screen. Finally, when people click the notification, a web browser of the receiver device shows a web page related to the incoming URL. 3.4 The Execution Screen of the Service Fig. 5 shows the execution screen of the BLE-based WebD2D service. The first screen shows a sharing web page of web browser and the second is a screen shot of the BLE URL Advertiser application which is broadcasting the URL using BLE. The third is a screen shot of the BLE URL Receiver application which displays an incoming URL information. The last one shows a web page when people click the receiving URL. Fig. 5. The execution screen of the WebD2D service 4 Copyright 2017 SERSC

5 4 Conclusions This paper describes the design and implementation of a BLE-based WebD2D service for android smartphones. WebD2D has features to help people to share the content of their web browsers with other people. We implemented WebD2D features in an open source-based mobile web browser. To verify the usefulness of WebD2D, we implemented a service which helps people to share the current URL of their web browsers with nearby people using BLE on their smartphones. Unlike existing content sharing of web browsers, the service enables people to share current URL with nearby people simultaneously. So, it helps people to save time and efforts for sharing content with other people. With the service, we convinced that WebD2D features are working correctly without any problems. Finally, we have a plan to extend WebD2D to Linuxbased devices such as set-top box in the future. Acknowledgments. This work was supported by Institute for Information & communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (R , Development of web-accelerated software framework for web-based mobile service ecosystem). References 1. Highweb Project, 2. Google, 3. S. Song, H. Oh, S. Park, S.-H. Kim, Y. Jeong and J. Choi, Method of Social Network Service Based Media Contents sharing by Modified URL shortening, 14th International Conference on Advanced Communication Technology (ICACT), IEEE Press, Korea, (2012), pp V. S. Srinivasan, Saleem, TNR Kumar and D. Kumar Yasarapu, Raspberry Pi and ibeacons as Environmental Data Monitors and the potential applications in a growing BigData ecosystem, IEEE International Conference on Recent Trends in Electronics Information Communication Technology, IEEE Press, India, (2016), pp Copyright 2017 SERSC 5