Beetle: Flexible Communication for Bluetooth Low Energy.

ABSTRACTThe next generation of computing peripherals will be low-power ubiquitous computing devices such as door locks, smart watches, and heart rate monitors. Bluetooth Low Energy is a primary protocol for connecting such peripherals to mobile and gateway devices. Current operating system support for Bluetooth Low Energy forces peripherals into vertical application silos. As a result, simple, intuitive applications such as opening a door with a smart watch or simultaneously logging and viewing heart rate data are impossible. We present Beetle, a new hardware interface that virtualizes peripherals at the application layer, allowing safe access by multiple programs without requiring the operating system to understand hardware functionality, fine-grained access control to peripheral device resources, and transparent access to peripherals connected over the network. We describe a series of novel applications that are impossible with existing abstractions but simple to implement with Beetle.