Browsing by Author "Ahola, Titta"

A number of electronic personal devices have increased enormously during the last years, and the mobile communication has become an important part of business and personal life. Thus, people need flexible and secure networking solutions that makes their personal devices and services accessible regardless of time and place. While a personal area network (PAN) enables communication between a person's devices around him/her, a personal network (PN) extends that PAN to other personal devices and services further away. First, a local cluster formation and then an interconnection to a personal network, should take place as automatically as possible. The formed network should adapt to its surroundings and support as many network technologies and devices as possible. This thesis focuses mainly on the network layer mechanisms of personal networks. First, the requirements for personal networks are presented, and existing technologies that can be utilised in it are introduced. The essential part of the thesis is an example design of the personal network architecture and its implementation. Furthermore, the thesis discusses how this architecture fulfils placed requirements, and presents an application that utilises the implemented personal network platform. The master's thesis has been written at VTT, and the described research work has been performed in the EU IST projects 'My Personal Adaptive Global Net' (MAGNET) and MAGNET Beyond.