How dynamic networks work: A short tutorial on spontaneous networks

The current race of the information technology society to connect any device to higher networks (e.g. to the Internet), has led to various applications that were unbelievable a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, with all the increasing amount of connectivity, setup, configuration and handling of electronic devices has become more and more complex and often today´s users are overwhelmed by functionality and required knowledge. To solve this problem, industry has turned to create intelligent devices, that do the interconnection work almost automatically and, therefore, are able to connect to so-called dynamic networks. At the very moment, some competitive approaches try to fight this challenge with common concepts behind, but slightly different technologies used. This paper starts with a short motivation why dynamic networks could be of interest for factory automation systems, too. Afterwards, we provide a tutorial on up-to-date spontaneous networks. We start with an insight into the approach proposed by Sun Microsystems, called Java Intelligent Network Infrastructure, followed by a quick overview on Microsoft´s approach, called Universal Plug and Play. Next, a proposed standard for wireless communication, called Blue-tooth, is presented. Finally, we show some dynamic features of the well-known Common Object Request Broker Architecture.