Name Resolution Middleware Using Relative Positional Relationship to Support Wireless Visible Area Communication

In this paper, we propose name resolution middleware that involves positional awareness to identify target hosts in wireless visible area communication (WVAC). WVAC is a wireless communication network that enables users to exchange information with nearby hosts, especially within the users' visible area, wherein the underlying network can be locally and temporarily constructed without the aid of any centralized administration. In such communication, the proposed middleware assists the user to intuitively identify a target host by presenting the relative positional relationship among the neighbor hosts. The middleware possesses the following characteristics: (1) it provides simple APIs to be easily utilized by various applications, (2) a dedicated server preliminarily located in the network is not required to operate it, and (3) it adopts a positioning method that could estimate the relative locations of neighbor hosts without any pre-configuration. Finally, we construct a prototype system and evaluate the middleware using this system. The results indicate that this middleware can sufficiently work even on resource-limited mobile devices.