Transparent Remote Connectivity to Bluetooth Low Energy Devices

The evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) has increased our needs for secure and transparent inter-connectivity between heterogeneous networks. We expect everything to be connected regardless of the access technology. However, an important part of the IoT consists of the short-range wireless communication technologies such as Bluetooth or ZigBee. These are not directly compatible with TCP/IP and so only usable within their physically bounded Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). We solve this problem with a new application-agnostic approach called Remote Connection Manager (RCM). RCM raises new opportunities to IoT ecosystems enabling transparent remote communication between an application and a (supposedly) short-range device. We implemented an open-source prototype for Bluetooth Low Energy technology to validate our solution and demonstrate the potential of such an original approach.