Personal Area Networks (cont.)

Conclusion

The success of any technology depends not on what it promises to achieve but on what it is actually able to deliver. The same is true for PANs also. As with other communication and data systems, in PAN there is a trade-off among access, convenience, and security. The technology is in prototyping stage today and most of the work has been done in the lower layers aiming to make transmissions over body work efficiently and reliably. Lots of work needs to be done at the higher layers relating to issues like security, authentication and reliability. Also, The sensitivity and bit rate must be increased in order to realize a watch-sized PAN transceiver. The trade-off among cost, speed, size, power, and operating range must be further studied and quantified in order to engineer practical PAN devices. These devices must shrink in size even further and provide a good development framework to catch the imaginations of developers.

The biggest advantage in support of PANs is that it opens a whole new front in networking. Body networks seem to a very natural evolution in the networking world where we have wide area networks, metropolitan area networks, local area networks and short range interdevice networks (piconets) using Bluetooth and IrDA. Body networks are the latest entrants in this field and are (until now) not competing with any other such solutions. The focus of body networks is different and that's why it is here to stay.

Cited References

1. O. Shivers, BodyTalk and the BodyNet: A Personal Information Infrastructure, Personal Information Architecture Note 1, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, Cambridge, MA (December 1, 1993).
2. M. Weiser, "The Computer for the 21st Century," Scientific American 265, No. 3, 94-104 (September 1991).
3. T. G. Zimmerman, J. R. Smith, J. A. Paradiso, D. Allport, and N. Gershenfeld, "Applying Electric Field Sensing to Human-Computer Interfaces," CHI'95 Human Factors in Computing Systems, Denver, May 9-11, 1995, ACM Press, New York.
4. W. Stalling, Networking Standards, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA (1993), pp. 23-26.
5. A. B. Carlson, Communication Systems, Third Edition, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York (1986), pp. 230, 401, 514-536, 554.
6. Intrabody buses for data and power: E. Rehmi Post, Matt Reynolds, Matthew Gray, Joe Paradiso, Neil Gershenfeld. Physics an Media, MIT media Lab.