Abstract
Personal networking has already become an increasingly important aspect of the unbounded connectivity in heterogeneous networking environments. Particularly, personal networks (PNs) based on mobile ad-hoc networking have seen recently a rapid expansion, due to the evolution of wireless devices supporting different radio technologies. Bluetooth can be considered as the launcher of the self-organizing net-working in the absence of fixed infrastructure, forming pico nets or even scatternets. Similar other wireless technologies (e.g., WiFi) attract a lot of attention in the context of mobile ad hoc networks, due to the high bandwidth flexibility and QoS selection ranges they feature, leveraging the path to develop advanced services and applications destined to the end user and beyond. Furthermore, personal networks are expected to provide a prosperous business filed for exploitation to third-party telecom players such as service and content providers, application developers, integrators, and so forth. In this article, a personal-to-nomadic networking case is presented. Academic PN (AcPN) is a generic case that aims to describe several situations of daily communication activities within a university campus or an extended academic environment through the support of the necessary technological background in terms of communication technologies. The concept is straightforward: a number of mobile users with different characteristics and communication requirements ranging from typical students to instructors and lecturers, researchers and professors, as well as third parties (e.g., visitors, campus staff), are met, work, interact, communicate, educate, and are being educated within such an environment. This implies the presence of a ubiquitous wireless personal networking environment having nomadic characteristics. Several interesting scenarios and use cases are analyzed, along with a number of proposed candidate mobile technology solutions per usage case.The article is organized as follows: first, a general description of the academic case is presented identifying examples of typical communication activities within an academic environment; the technical requirements necessary for a successful deployment of personal area network (PAN)/PN technologies within the academic environment are also listed. Next, specific deployment scenarios are presented, followed by a business analysis. The article closes with a concluding section.