The concept of personal networking has been introduced in MAGNET. The scope of the networking activity, to be pursued in MAGNET Beyond, consisted in connecting securely personal devices, nodes, services and applications located around the person and in distant personal clusters (e.g. car, home or office). A personal network (PN) is then a dynamic collection of interconnected heterogeneous personal devices. One of the first objectives of MAGNET was to design a secure PN-architecture. This architecture is composed of three abstraction levels: a connectivity level, a network level and a service abstraction level. Starting from this PN-architecture, MAGNET has produced a number of key components to build gradually the long term MAGNET architecture.

The main achievements of MAGNET include autonomous P-PAN formation, PN formation where tunnels and VPNs are established with the personal devices in remote clusters, and a service and context discovery framework. In collaboration with the security activity, the networking task has proposed a key generation and derivation framework to establish trusted communication within a PN. Other components that have been introduced are the PN agent and the edge router. The PN-agent maintains information on the PN constituents and their connectivity and enables and eases PN management. The edge router in the access part of the interconnecting structure reduces the burden on the gateway node(s) in the clusters by supporting these nodes with secure tunnel establishment and maintenance.

The objective of MAGNET Beyond is to take the notion of personal networks envisioned in MAGNET to a larger context immersing the users in groups and in the community. The daily life of persons does not involve their personal network only, but persons also need to communicate and collaborate with groups of people. This project consequently aims at extending the PN networking and security paradigms produced in MAGNET to PN-to-PN communications and the formation of overlays involving devices and nodes from multiple PNs.

Figure 6.3 depicts how constituents from various PNs are federated in overlays to establish trusted groups and communities. MAGNET Beyond in this envisioned evolutionary path towards networking of people, will address the needs in collaborative working, resource sharing or common interest groups such as family members, friends, kids at school, colleagues or public servants. In such contexts, networking and security are confronted with far greater challenges. Even if MAGNET had already foreseen this need in its initial vision, it has concentrated first on designing enablers for user-centric personal networking and on creating a secure architectural framework suitable and viable for PN services. Consequently MAGNET Beyond will extend the scope of networking to PN-to-PN communications and PN-federation and develop solutions for this enlarged perspective.

Obviously, networking and all other MAGNET Beyond tasks and activities will bring together the PN enablers through the specification of interfaces between past and future components for an early integration into an overall PN architecture. The extended PN networking activity will prepare the path towards pilot PN services. MAGNET Beyond will address thoroughly scalability, latency, system availability, resilience, QoS, end-to-end performance, adaptability and flexibility.

The activities in WP2 have been defined accordingly and address: PN federation, interaction and interworking with external networks and an extension of context discovery to move to group communication. Another activity addresses QoS and optimisation of the overall MAGNET PN Architecture and will cover interactions inside the PN but also interactions with external networks and service platforms and with the connectivity abstraction level.

As illustrated by figure 6.4, WP2 focuses on layer 3 aspects, but requires interaction at several levels.

WP2 are divided into the following tasks

• Task 1 Context awareness
• Task 2 Service control and interworking
• Task 3 PN federation