PerNets 2010 - 4th IEEE International Workshop on Personalized Networks (PerNets 2010)

Personalized Networks

to be held in conjunction with
The IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference
(CCNC 2010)

January 9-12, 2010 - Harrah's Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
http://pernets.irctr.tudelft.nl/

Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and the IEEE Digital Library

Paper submission via EDAS.
(Please read the submission instructions below first)

Purpose of this workshop

The ubiquitous nature of wireless networks has spawned many interesting applications that were unimagined hitherto. It has also brought many challenges for the communication and networking community to address. On one hand we see present day mobile devices are capable of providing many services that required several devices before. For example, most cell phones nowadays provide high speed data access, still and video cameras, PDA functionality, etc. These advances in device sophistication and service offerings, including wireless hotspots, have made a difference in the way we communicate. With increased user mobility and user's desire to always be connected, we have seen a growing interest in Personal Area Networks (PANs) and Body Area Networks (BANs). These networks can be tuned and applied meaningfully for individual users and their requirements. On the other hand the Internet has changed our way of interacting dramatically. These two major communication areas are having an in-depth influence on the way we communicate; it is worth considering them 'together' as the future communication vehicle.

Personalized Networks is one such future oriented concept where we seek to bring BANs, PANs, WLAN, sensor networks, ad hoc networks, home networks, vehicular networks and the Internet together onto one platform under one broader vision of future (4G) communication networks. The idea is to enable continuous and seamless connectivity of all the personal devices of a user, information sources, and network enabled controllers in an unobtrusive way, regardless of where these entities are located - be they local or remote. It is a microcosm of the persons themselves with their associated accessories somewhere on the Internet. It is equivalent to the Internet presence that has become a prominent concept in the last decade. This advanced overlay network is strongly person oriented and must be ad hoc, intelligent and must behave as a user-friendly virtual intelligent personal assistant to its owner. It is a personal distributed environment, global in scope that can co-exist on the present day Internet with its active participation. Such a platform enables many new applications, especially for users with rapidly changing communication demands that often operate in various contexts simultaneously. It can also provide the much needed user-friendliness to many services of today.

There are numerous issues which are challenging to the communication network community in realizing a Personalized Network. Most of them arise from the lack of current technology to deal in a transparent way with the dynamic and mobile nature of the entities, the unpredictable topology of the network, the power constraints of the mobile devices, and the heterogeneity of the networking and link-level technologies. Therefore, creating a Personalized Network yields new architectures, protocols, algorithms, platforms, middleware, etc. They take care of addressing, routing, resource and service discovery, the self-organization of the network, the localization of the devices/person, the complex security and privacy requirements, the offering of context aware services and service management. Many of these issues, ventured upon earlier under various mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) and mobile network research initiatives, need to be reconsidered in this case. These technologies have to meet strict requirements with respect to user perception, viable business models, usage of communication bandwidth, protocol complexity, robustness, availability of links and infrastructure, dependability and trust.