MAGNET beyond

My Personal Adaptive Global NET and Beyond

MAGNET Beyond is an Integrated Project (IP) supported within the Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) of the EU Commission. The project acronym stands for "My personal Adaptive Global NET and Beyond". MAGNET Beyond is financed by the EU Commission as well as by the consortium of 32 partners from 15 countries among these Industrial Partners, Universities and Research Centres and has a duration of 30 months, starting from January 1st 2006.

MAGNET Beyond is a follow up of the MAGNET project and its goal is to bring the vision of the adaptive global personal networks further on. Some of the main focus areas of MAGNET Beyond are user-centricity, personalization and personal networking, service ubiquity and federation.

MAGNET Beyond wants to improve the quality of life for the user, and this we will do by introducing new technologies that are more adapted to the needs of the user. We do research that makes environments smarter, more responsive, and more accommodating to the needs of the user, while at the same time ensuring the privacy and security of the individual.

FOKUS participates actively in the Security Working Group in the
following areas:

1. development of the mechanisms necessary to bootstrap and manage the trust relationships between personal devices in a highly distributed and decentralized environment;
2. design of reputation-based mechanisms enabling users to assess the trustfulness and reliability of services and routing paths;
3. development of security interfaces to third party service providers and IMS infrastructures in particular;
4. security mechanisms for peer-to-peer communications and P2P SIP in particular;

Challenges

The MAGNET Beyond vision is that Personal Networks (PNs) will support the user's professional and private activities without jeopardizing privacy and security. The support in professional and private activities will take place through the user's own personal network (PN) consisting of a core Personal Area Network (PAN) extended with clusters of remote devices which could be private, shared, or public and able to adapt to the quality of the network accessed. In addition to the technological aspect, MAGNET Beyond also aims at addressing socio-economic issues in order for the concept to make sense from a business and user perspective.

Project-Goals

Achieving the MAGNET Beyond objectives requires the solution of a number of technological issues related to networking aspects, coexistence and interworking between a multitude of different network interconnection schemes, wireless technology for PNs, security and privacy. These solutions will be validated through demonstrators. Besides the technological aspects we also address user and socio-economic issues, to ensure that the concept is validated from a business and user perspective. The project addresses mainly those research issues that need to be solved in order to realise the PN concept. The perspective of this approach is to make a major contribution to the standardisation bodies and fora.

MAGNET Beyond produces a framework for future PN technologies and architectures. Results will be made available for wide dissemination and the aim is to push this framework as a basis for further industry exploitation.

In order to achieve this, the project has set specific objectives to,

• Analyse and assess user requirements for PNs and technological trends.
• Develop user-centric business model concepts for PNs in multi-network, multi-device and multi-user environments.
• Design and develop an architecture and protocols for building PNs based on heterogeneous networks, and optimised from a user perspective.
• Validate efficient, flexible and scalable air interface(s) for the PAN components of a PN.
• Develop integrated mechanisms for a secure PN in order to ensure the privacy of the user’s data.
• Enable the cooperation between different devices, services and users in a secure manner.
• Adapt the required processing power and messaging exchange in accordance with the required security level and characteristics and constraints of devices used.
• Enable inter-provider communication in a secure manner, i.e., allow a user to use devices owned and services provided by other entities when authorised to do so.
• Overall integration by cross-layer optimisation of lower and upper layers.
• Validate the overall PN concept through the design of a flexible platforms.
• Build awareness of PN concepts and application.
• Educate experts through arranged training events and workshops.

Technology

Bluetooth
Bluetooth is an open standard for short-range transmission of digital voice and data between mobile devices (laptops, PDAs, phones) and desktop devices. It supports point-to-point and multipoint applications. Bluetooth provides up to 720 Kbps data transfer within a range of 10 meters and up to 100 meters with a power boost. It uses omnidirectional radio waves that can be transmitted through walls and other non-metal barriers..

WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network)
Two different technologies can be considered in this project,

• 802.11, which refers to a family of specifications developed by the IEEE for wireless LAN technology. 802.11 specifies an over-the-air interface between a wireless client and a base station or between two wireless clients. The IEEE accepted the specification in 1997.
• HiperLAN/2, which stands for High Performance Radio Local Area Network, is a wireless LAN standard developed by the Broadband Radio Access Networks (BRAN) division of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). HiperLAN/2 defines a very efficient, high-speed wireless LAN technology that fully meets the requirements of Europe's spectrum regulatory. Similar to IEEE 802.11a, HiperLAN/2 operates in the 5GHz frequency band using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and offers data rates of up to 54Mbps. In fact, the physical layer of HiperLAN/2 is very similar to the one that 802.11a defines.

UMTS
3G Systems aims to provide a global mobility with wide range of services including telephony, messaging, Internet access and broadband data. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) started the process of defining the standard for the third generation systems, referred as International Mobile Telecommunications 2000 (IMT-2000). In Europe, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) was responsible of the UMTS standardization process. In 1998, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) was formed to continue the technical specification work. 3GPP has five main UMTS standardization areas: Radio Access Network, Core Network, Terminals, Services and System Aspects and GERAN.

Liberty Alliance
The Internet is currently the most important vehicle for exchanging all kinds of data. The notion of identity is the crucial component of this vehicle. Identity simply  refers to the global set of attributes that are contained in an individual's various accounts with different service providers. These attributes include information such as name, phone numbers, social security numbers, addresses, credit records, and payment information. Today, one’s identity on the Internet is fragmented across various identity providers: employers, business services, etc. This fragmentation yields isolated, high-friction, one-to-one customer-to- business relationships and experiences.

Federated network identity is the key to reducing this friction. The vision of the Liberty Alliance Project is to enable a networked world in which individuals and businesses can more easily conduct transactions while protecting the privacy and security of vital identity information. The main objectives of the Liberty Architecture can be described as follows:

• To provide an open single sign-on standard that includes decentralized authentication and authorization from multiple providers.
• To create a network identity infrastructure that supports all current and emerging network access devices.

Partners

• Aalborg University (Denmark)
• Advanced Communications Research and Development S.A. (Spain)
• ALCATEL Italia (Italy)
• Brunel University (UK)
• Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique Recherche et Development SA (Switzerland)
• Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (France)
• National Institute of Informational and Communication Technologie (Japan)
• Danmarks Tekniske Universitet (Denamrk)
• Delft University of Technology (The Nederlands)
• France Telecom R&D (France)
• Fraunhofer FOKUS (Germany)
• Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien Betriebs-GmbH (Austria)
• Groupe des Ecoles des Télécommunications - Institut National des Télécommunications (France)
• Institute of Communication and Computer Systems (ICCS) of the National Technical University of Athens (Greece)
• Interuniversitair Micro-Elektronica Centrum vzw (Belgium)
• INTRACOM S.A. Hellenic Telecommunications and Electronics Industry (Greece)
• Lund University (Sweden)
• NEC Europe Ltd. (Germany)
• Nokia Corporation OYJ (Finland)
• Nokia GmbH (Germany)
• Personal Communication: Identification, Innovation, Implementation (Denmark)
• Philips Consumer Electronics IC-Lab. (The Nederlands)
• Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology/CAS (Switzerland)
• Tata Consultancy Service (India)
• TeliaSonera (Sweden)
• Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo Sociedad Anónima Unipersonal (Spain)
• Universidad de Cantabria (Spain)
• The University of Surrey (UK)
• University of Rome "Tor Vergata" (Italy)
• Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT, Finland)
• Twente Institute of Wireless and Mobile Communications (The Netherlands)
• University of Kassel (Germany)