User Requirements & Demand for
Services and Applications in PNs –
paper presented at IST Mobile &
Wireless Communication Summit,
June 2004, Lyon
B. Jiang, V. Kaldanis, A. Markopoulos, M. Monti,
R. Prasad, D. Saugstrup, N. Schultz and K.E. Skouby
CTI Working Paper, no. 89, 2004
Center for Tele-Information
User requirements & demand for services and applications in PNs
a
B. Jiang,
c
V, Kaldanis,
c
A. Markopoulos,
b
M. Monti,
b
R. Prasad,
a
D. Saugstrup,
a
N. Schultz and
a
K.E. Skouby
a
Center for Tele-Information, Technical University of Denmark, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark
b
PCOM:I
3
, Niels Jernes Vej 10, DK 9220 Aalborg, Denmark
c
Telecommunications Laboratory, N.T.U.A, Greece
ABSTRACT
This paper focuses on the methodology for analyses of user
requirements and demand for specific services and
applications in relation to personal networks (PNs). The
paper has a strong user-centric approach to service and
application development based on the widely accepted fact
that future services and applications need to be develop
with a much stronger focus on the end-users’ needs and
demands.
The paper is based on ongoing work in WP1 of the
MAGNET project (My personal Adaptive Global NET)
including contributions to determine, clarify and
understand user requirements and the future demand for
services and applications in a PN setting. This further
includes discussion of service categorization, service
description and human-value issues as personalization,
security and privacy, billing and price and human-
computer interaction paradigms.
I. INTRODUCTION
The MAGNET project addresses research issues in
personal distributed environments, where the users interact
with various entities, devices and systems, without having
to pay attention to the physical location of these.
In the MAGNET context, PNs encompass potentially all of
a person’s devices, being networking enabled and capable
of connecting to a network, physical or wireless. This
means that PNs are configured in an ad-hoc way – as the
demand or opportunity becomes available – creating a
communication sphere around the user.
Market demand
The overall goal of the MAGNET project is to develop and
enable commercially viable PNs, i.e. they are affordable,
user-friendly and beneficial to different kinds of users in
all aspects of their everyday and business life. This
statement is based on the hypothesis that successful
emerging technologies have to focus on user demands
enabled by technology and their adding to quality of life.
Furthermore, future services and applications should be
adapted to needs and demands of individuals, i.e. on a high
level of personalization and contextual awareness.
The vision of the MAGNET project is that future users will
be supported in their private and professional activities by
their PN, where the core PN consists of a personal area
network (PAN). The devices or resources, which constitute
the PN, will include e.g. computers, PDAs, mobile phones,
headsets and cameras – basically all kinds of IP-based and
thereby Internet enabled devices with communication and
processing capabilities. As the PN concept builds on a
significant amount of peer-to-peer and internetworking
between different wired and wireless technologies some
access schemes will be free of charge, while others will be
chargeable - as they are made available through
infrastructure-based networks.
Looking at the mass-market perspectives, PN-based
technologies are expected to provide a wide variety of new
services and applications, especially based on trends in
personal and professional mobility and nomadic patterns.
Therefore PN and PAN systems are believed to be one of
the most important growth markets of the future within
telecommunications.
PN concepts
We address the research issues in personal distributed
environments, where users interact with various
companions, embedded or invisible computers not only in
their close vicinity but potentially anywhere. These
systems are called Personal Networks. PNs constitute a
category of distributed systems with very specific
characteristics. The concept of Personal Networks has been
described in [5] and [6].
PNs comprise potentially “all of a person’s devices
capable of network connection whether in his or her
wireless vicinity, at home or in the office”. Enabling this
vision transparently for the users results in major
extensions of the present Personal Area Networking (PAN)
and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) interaction paradigms.
PNs are configured in an ad-hoc fashion, as the
opportunity and the demand arise to support personal
applications.
PNs consist of communicating clusters of personal and
general digital devices shared with others and connected
through various suitable interconnection mechanisms. At
the heart of a PN is a core Personal Area Network (PAN),
which is physically associated with the owner of the PN.
The core PAN is extended on-demand and in an ad-hoc
fashion with personal resources or resources belonging to
other users. This extension can be realized physically via
infrastructure networks, e.g. the Internet, an intranet or a
PAN belonging to another person, company or even a
home network. This is illustrated in the following Figure 1.
