My personal Adaptive Global NET (MAGNET)

This book is the outcome of the research and development contributions of partners from three different continents, Asia, Europe, America, coming from universities,research centers, industrial partners and SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprise),all of them collaborating in MAGNET (My Adaptive Personal Global Net) and MAGNET Beyond project supported by European Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The project was focusing on a secure user-centric approach developing secure Personal Networks in multi-network, multi-device, and multi-user environments.

The innovative concept of Personal Network (PN), which was introduced and developed in MAGNET, finds in this book the first confirmation of the success that the future of wireless communications is bound to achieve. The importance of this book is not only related to being the first work on PNs, it also gives an overview of operation of a big project, like MAGNET, and in fact the organisation of the book reflects how then project itself has been structured.The book summarize all the steps taken from the introduction of a user-centric perspective until the implementation of PN-Fs, outlining the applications and commercialisations of the new concepts carried out of the project. The starting point has been the concept of Personal Network coming out like an extension of the local scope of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) by addressing virtual personal environments that span a variety of infrastructures. The new element was that the composition, organisation, and topology of a PN have determined by its context and the geographical location, the time, the environment and the explicit wishes to use particular services determined which device and network element have been incorporated in a PN.