BeaconNet: A Beacon-Based Smartphone Ad-Hoc Network for Resource-Constrained Classrooms

Instructors and learners in every country have increasing access to smartphones, and a variety of pedagogical tools and techniques have been developed to leverage the affordances of these devices in classroom settings. Two common patterns of communication between such devices are many-to-one (e.g.,...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kumar, Viraj, Philip, Adithya Abraham, Shekeran, Sarah, Singhania, Pranav, Rustagi, Ram P.
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Ad-hoc network
Androids
Bluetooth
Data transfer
Humanoid robots
Performance evaluation
Reliability
Smartphone
Wi-Fi
Wireless fidelity
Online Access:Request full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Instructors and learners in every country have increasing access to smartphones, and a variety of pedagogical tools and techniques have been developed to leverage the affordances of these devices in classroom settings. Two common patterns of communication between such devices are many-to-one (e.g., when each learner's device sends data to the instructor's device) and one-to-many (e.g., when the instructor's device sends data to each learner's device). Every classroom usually requires additional infrastructure (such as a Wi-Fi router) to reliably transmit this data, which can be challenging for institutions with limited resources. We therefore present BeaconNet, a hybrid Bluetooth/Wi-Fi beacon-based smartphone ad-hoc network that requires no infrastructure beyond commodity smartphones already owned by learners and instructors. BeaconNet supports many-to-one and one-to-many communication between these devices. For applications where the volume of communication is small (a few tens of bytes per message), it is faster and scales to large classrooms (up to 80 learners) more reliably than existing infrastructure-less solutions.
ISSN:2161-377X
DOI:10.1109/ICALT.2018.00029