A Profile-Based Network Layer Architecture for Personal Ubiquitous Environments

The proliferation of heterogeneous devices, ranging from mobile communication to home electronics and their internetworking have resulted into the development of a "personal ubiquitous environment" around the user. In this increasingly complex world, personal networks (PN) and personal network federations (PN-F) provide simple but powerful concepts towards the vision of "personal ubiquitous environments". In this paper, we present the profile-based network layer design to realise the federations of personal networks. To this end, we introduce the possible architectures for PN federations and their initiation, formation and usage procedures, which are assisted by personal network profiles. Moreover, we also discuss the PN cluster formation procedure, which is performed by personal network routing protocol (PNRP). For the implementation and the evaluation of our proposed solutions, we particularly focus on spontaneous PN-F architecture. The proof-of-concept is given and the performance of our spontaneous PN-F scheme is evaluated.