Bradio: A wireless infrastructure for pervasive computing environments

The ability to identify the locations and identities of objects is important to research in pervasive computing. While several commercial systems exist for tracking inventory and identifying objects (RFID tags, barcodes, etc.), none of these systems provide the programmable flexibility required to support research in pervasive environments, The goal of pervasive systems research is to investigate how a computationally rich environment can support human-computer interactions. More specifically, we are building infrastructure to connect sensors, actuators and displays in these environments. To aid in this effort, we have developed a flexible platform for experimenting with wireless communication. The goal of this effort is to create an infrastructure to support identification and communication wirelessly. Our secondary goal is to enable this communication in a small, low-power package. The end result is a system we call Bradios. We will describe the motivation for building the system, the system architecture, the different components in the architecture, and an example application.