IoT meets exhibition areas: A modular architecture to improve proximity interactions

The concept of proximity has been recently adopted in various fields of interest, with different meanings and implementations. In the Information Technology area, for example, proximity was used for analyzing user location and nearness to objects/people, and has already changed the way people interact with each other and with technology itself. In this field, the concept is becoming more important with the diffusion of IoT, the network of "things" connected to each other to share services and features. This paper aims at analyzing how the IoT can improve proximity interactions by developing a case study in an exhibition area (tradeshow), with the goal of enhancing participants' and exhibitors' experience. Starting from the analysis of existing works, we designed a scenario to identify IoT-enabled application features for both participants and exhibitors. We propose a modular architecture able to provide different services to all stakeholders: it offers a baseline for exhibitors who want to provide new interactive services to participants (e.g., to control some exhibited device) and some social services to participants for interacting among themselves and with exhibitors. Finally, we validate our architecture implementing the initial scenario on top of the AllJoynTM framework, an emerging proximity based software framework.