Empowering wireless personal communications
One of the main impacts of wireless personal networks (WPNs) comes from the evolution of intelligent spaces populated by sensors. Wireless embedded sensors combine high-performance sensing, computation and communication capabilities in a single tiny resource-constrained device. Up to now, these have been used for very specific applications, but they are likely to play a fundamental role in near-future personal communication environments. Their future usage scenarios range from monitoring environmental conditions to ubiquitous computing environments, allowing people to interact with various companions and embedded computers in their close vicinity. Focused on proposing a workable architecture to cope with heterogeneity issues, the PACWOMAN project designed a generic platform to leverage information sharing between different layers and communication protocol entities. Within the WPN, basic and more advanced devices belonging to a single person and cooperating for a certain period of time constitute his/her personal area network (PAN). A higher topological level arises if communications are established between terminals belonging to different (PANs). If the establishment of a direct connection between them is impossible, other nodes would relay the information from the source to the destination, resulting in a multi-hop network. Optimisation could be carried out at the lower levels of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) model implemented for PANs. In particular, special attention was devoted to the improvement and balance of both physical and media access control (MAC) layers in terms of energy consumption and low latency mechanisms. On the other hand, in community area networks (CANs), routing plays a key function that has to be carefully analysed. For ad hoc routing enhancements and TCP/IP stack boosting, pieces of information must be made available to the upper layers to proceed with cross-layer optimisation. The PAN and CAN optimisation layer (PCOL) can be embedded just below the TCP/IP stack as an add-on functionality to control information traversing all the protocol stack layers. The approach adopted within the PACWOMAN project is only a starting point, since optimally, there should be more standardised application programming interfaces to access wireless interfaces that enable WPN building.
