Connect with things through instant messaging

Abstract

As society and technology advance, we need more frequent communication not only with coworkers but also with things. In this paper, we introduce a new communication paradigm and a prototype system that implements the paradigm. It is a communication façade that supports human-human, human-thing, and thing-thing communication using instant messaging. With this system, we can add any things worth talking with to our buddy list, and communicate with it through its instant messaging agent that encapsulates its services and status. We adopt a pipe & filter architecture pattern for the agent due to the requirements of extensibility. For efficient cooperation, presence information is also needed, and we suggest a statechart based presence model of things. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.