MAGNET Beyond was 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". Some of the main focus areas of MAGNET Beyond are user-centricity, personalization and personal networking.

MAGNET Beyond examined how to improve the quality of life for the user.  The MAGNET Beyond research developed the Personal Network concept that makes environments smarter, more responsive, and more accommodating to the needs of the user. All this without jeopardizing privacy and security of the individual.

MAGNET Beyond had a duration of 30 months, and started on January 1st 2006. The MAGNET Beyond consortium had 32 partners. MAGNET Beyond had a total cost of 16.3 million euros.

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, Denmark
Delft University of Technology , The Netherlands
France Telecom R&D, France
FGH/FOKUS, Germany
Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien Betriebs-GmbH, Austria
Groupe des Ecoles des T é l é communications - Institut National des T é l é communications, 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
Nokia Corporation OYJ, Finland
Nokia GmbH, Germany
Personal Communication: Identification, Innovation, Implementation, Denmark
Philips Consumer Electronics IC-Lab., The Netherlands
Shanghai Institute of Microsystems and Information Technology/CAS, Switzerland
Tata Consultancy Service , India
TeliaSonera , Sweden
Telef ó nica Investigaci ó n y Desarrollo Sociedad An ó nima Unipersonal, Spain
Universidad de Cantabria, Spain
The University of Surrey , UK
University of Rome " Tor Vergata " , Italy
Technical Research Centre of Finland , Finland
Twente Institute of Wireless and Mobile Communications, The Netherlands
University of Kassel , Germany

Motivation

A common belief has evolved that new technologies should be centred on the user, improving the quality of life and adapting to the individual, without the need for the individual to be aware of technical details. Communications environments need to become smarter, more responsive, and more accommodating to the needs of the individual. Future technologies must provide context-aware services and simultaneously introduce new levels of personal safety. Personalisation and ubiquitous access to information and communications will be essential. Users will be able to create a personal profile that, according to the situation and moment, will allow them to access the most relevant information via the most suitable means of communication.

Vision

The MAGNET 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 also addressed socio-economic issues in order for the concept to make sense from a business and user perspective.  

Mission 

The mission is to enable commercially viable Personal Networks that are attractive, affordable and also beneficial for the end-users in their everyday life. What makes the MAGNET project particularly interesting is that it constitutes a system approach to what is expected to be one of the most important telecom related growth markets of the future, i.e. the Personal Area Network (PAN).

Scientific & Technological Objectives

MAGNET does not treat Personal Area Networks (PANs) in isolation: the concept is extended into that of a Personal Network (PN) by interconnecting PANs via wirelessly accessed wide area networks to access the wealth of services available on and through these networks, including those offered by other PANs. Personal Networks comprise potentially " all of a person ' s devices capable of network connection whether in his or her wireless vicinity, at home or in the office " . The work towards enabling this vision transparently for users results in major extensions of the present Personal Area Networking and Ambient Intelligence paradigms.


PNs are configured in ad ad-hoc fashion, as the opportunity and the demand arise to support personal applications. PNs consist of communicating clusters of personal and foreign digital devices, possibly shared with others, and connected through various suitable communications means. At the heart of a PN is a core Personal Area Network, which is physically associated with the owner of the PN. Unlike PANs, with a limited geographically coverage, PNs have an unrestricted geographical span, and may incorporate devices into the personal environment regardless of their geographic location. In order to extend their reach, they need the services of infrastructure-based, and possibly also ad-hoc, networks.

The MAGNET overall objectives were to design, develop, demonstrate and validate the concept of a flexible Personal Network (PN) that supports resource-efficient, robust, ubiquitous service provisioning in a secure, heterogeneous networking environment for nomadic users. Of paramount importance is the requirement that a PN will support the user in both private and business activities, while safeguarding the security and privacy of the users and their data

Project Objectives

Achieving the MAGNET 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 produced 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

Scenarios

Two scenarios have been selected for which working pilot applications will be developed:

MAGNET.Care : Health Care is one specific application domain where a range of user activities are conducted on a daily basis. MAGNET PNs and enabling underlying technologies can support and enhance the possibilities for patients, e.g. diabetics to sustain a high quality of life by disease self management.

Professionals@Work : The highly mobile professionals have a special need for services and applications that support their everyday activities. This scenario will investigate how an extended use of Personal Networks (PN) and Personal Area Networks (PAN) can improve and support professional working environments regarding work processes, collaboration and organisational forms in highly mobile environments.

NEC had lead the  PN Networking (WP2) activities.

Main focus was on developing the MAGNET context system. The system retrieves sensor and system information, assigns semantic information to the information, and process low-level input into high-level useful knowledge. Furthermore, the context system organizes itself to adapt to the changing system structure of the PN, as well as to federation requests from users.

NEC has developed the Context Access Language (CALA) which enables declarative access to context information.

Furthermore, PN Netowrking has extended PN networking and security paradigms for PN-to-PN communications and for the formation of overlays from multiple Personal Networks. Context information will be used in order to support the formation and management of the network, as well as enable the creation of context-aware user applications.

NEC participated in WP1 (Users, Pilot Services and Market) and WP4 (Security and Privacy).

The MAGNET Beyond project produces some outstanding R&D results. The major achievement was a completely integrated new protocol stack for Personal Networks that included:

• Newly defined security protocols for establishing PN trust and security
• An advanced Universal Convergence Layer (UCL) that enables to detect nearby devices and networks and associate with them for PN or PN-Federation
• A modified IP layer for optimized routing in the PN as well as between PNs
• A system concept that enables to establish PNs across various wireless technologies and network segements, as well as to establish a network and service level federation of PNs with each other.
• A service layer using P2P protocols for service announcement and discovery.
• Integration with an external systems like IMS.
  

L. Sanchez, J. Lanza, I. Moerman, J. Hoebeke, K. Ahola, M. Alutoin, J.J. Pallares, M. Bauer, M. Girod-Genet and J. Zeiss: Assessing Personal Networks on a Pan-European Testbed , ICT Mobile Summit 2008, Stockholm, 2008.

E. Kovacs, D. Kraft, A. Cimmino, S. Bessler, M. Ghader and L. Gavrilovska: Personal Networks as Distributed Clients for IMS , ICT Mobile Summit 2008, 2008.

MAGNET: Personal Networks & Personal Networks Federation - A Tutorial – , Presentation at the First Workshop on User Generated Services, Madrid, 2008.

R.Prasad. (Ed.): My personal Adaptive Global NET (MAGNET) (ISBN: 978-90-481-3436-6)  Prasad, R., eds., Springer, 2010.

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Please visit also the MAGNET website