Symbolic device for short-range wireless pairwise communication

Laptop computers and cellular phones often have the capability for short-range wireless communication such as adhoc mode in wireless LAN and Bluetooth. However, the use of the capability is limited due to the lack of consideration for short- range communications in conventional communication protocols; i.e., an unnatural and troublesome procedure is required to specify targets especially within a nearby area. In this paper, we propose a symbolic device to support short-range wireless communications that provides the ability to specify a target on the real-world environment. More specifically, a short-range communication device is logically concerned with its corresponding symbolic device and the short-range communication with a target is established by linking the symbol device with the target directly or indirectly. Furthermore, we designed and implemented a prototype system for the proposed device using wired and wireless LAN.