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xiv Preface
development and prototypes of technical solutions for the basic functionalities required in
personal networks, but also to first experiments with applications and the study of potential
business models. The concrete solutions that are presented in this book were developed in
those projects. In parallel, similar ideas had been developed in the UK in the context of the
Mobile Virtual Centre of Excellence by James Irvine and John Dunlop at the University
of Strathclyde. Their concept was named the ‘personal distributed environment’.
The ideas about personal networks were very much centered on the person and how
her capabilities could be enhanced by creating a synergetic environment consisting of the
hundreds of personal digital devices she might own in the near future. A natural next step
was to explore how similar synergies could be achieved by pooling personal resources
to support and enhance the activities of a group of people. This led to the concept of
federations of personal networks belonging to different people. These ideas were also
explored in the MAGNET Beyond and PNP2008 projects.
The basic foundations have been laid to build personal networks and their federations,
and prototypes and demonstrators have been built. More research is needed in particular
to create environments that allow rapid development of personal network applications,
and to facilitate different business roles and models to make the concepts commercially
viable. This will also require efforts in standardization, which have already started.
The market pull to build and use personal networks and their federations is not there
yet. However, we believe that we are on the brink of a breakthrough in this respect. If
the WWRF predictions of 1000 devices per person in 2017 and the 100 billion mobile
Internet devices in the next decade foreseen by Cisco (Cisco Systems 2009) become a
reality, concepts such as personal networks will be good tools not only to manage the
resulting complexity, but, even more importantly, to create hitherto unknown opportunities
to empower people in their private lives and at work.
This book covers the core concepts of personal networks and federations of personal
networks, and explains their architecture. It elaborates in detail the various aspects of
these architectures, including topics such as networking, self-configuration, security, per-
sonal services, service sharing, and context management. It also discusses the outcomes
of several personal network research projects, including the prototypes. It is aimed at
researchers, developers, and standardization experts in mobile and wireless communica-
tion systems and services. It should also be of interest to graduate students in the field of
telecommunications and distributed systems.
The book is organized as follows. The introductory Chapter 1 describes the vision under-
lying personal networks. This is followed by Chapter 2 that set the stage by discussing
user requirements and Chapter 3 that covers trends in personal networking. Readers who
are up to date on the state of the art of developments in wireless and mobile technologies
and applications and ubiquitous computing may go straight to Chapter 4 that discusses
the personal network architecture. Next are several detailed chapters that may be read
independently: Chapter 5 on cluster formation and routing, Chapter 6 on inter-cluster
tunneling, Chapter 7 on communication between a personal network and entities that do
not belong to it (the so-called foreign devices), Chapter 8 on application support, Chapter
9 on security, and Chapter 10 on federations of personal networks. Chapter 11 introduces
three different existing personal network prototypes that builds on the concepts introduced
in the previous chapters. The book is rounded off by Chapter 12, which gives the authors’
view on the future of personal networks.