MORENA: A Middleware for Programming NFC-Enabled Android Applications as Distributed Object-Oriented Programs

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Publication Type:

Book Chapter

Authors:

Andoni Lombide Carreton; Kevin Pinte; Wolfgang De Meuter

Source:

Middleware 2012, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Volume 7662, p.61-80 (2012)

ISBN:

978-3-642-35169-3

URL:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35170-9_4

Keywords:

Android, mobile applications, pervasive computing, RFID

Abstract:

NFC is a wireless technology that allows software to interact with RFID tags and that is increasingly integrated into smartphones and other mobile devices. In this paper, we present MORENA: a middleware that treats NFC-enabled programs as distributed object-oriented programs in which RFID tags are represented as intermittently connected remote objects. We draw inspiration from the ambient-oriented programming paradigm to represent these objects as first-class remote references which only offer asynchronous communication with the tag to which they refer. This allows the programmer to implement mobile applications that read from or write to RFID tags without having to handle every single fault manually and without blocking the entire application during read or write operations. We built MORENA on top of the Android platform and evaluated our abstractions by implementing a representative application running on NFC-enabled Android phones using MORENA.