Pervasive Networking

Today, the field of computer networking has made remarkably commendable progress towards robust data delivery, that there is an ever growing need for a new direction to provide a much awaited thrust to explore unexplored frontiers. My guess is that the vision of human pervasive computing has a lot in store for the networking community to look into for innovation. Traditionally, networking has dealt with moving packets along, and umpteen optimizations to improve the QoS delivered to the end user. In these scenarios, the end user has never been considered at any of the layers below the application layer in the networking stack. The implications are that the network is expected to merely transfer data to the end host machines, and the user is expected to hook on to one of these end hosts. Today we are surrounded by numerous computing devices which are inter networked, that the above service model is an under utilisation of the networking services practically available. By interconnecting personal area networking technologies like bluetooth with the WAN technologies such as the internet, we can expect data to be delivered to the end user directly without the need for them to log into their static networked machine. For e.g let us consider the following scenario. Grad Student X makes slides for a presentation and mails them to his advisor late at night and crashes. The next morning, the advisor looks at the slides and decides to have a meeting at a time which can be considered a bit early for grad student lifestyle, and sends a mail to X. However X is fast asleep, and doesnt wake up to see the mail until its too late. Consequently X misses the meeting and decides to blog how his networking field could have helped him in such a scenario. Now, if the mail instead of sitting in his inbox could have rang his bluetooth phone about half an hour before the scheduled meeting time, then probably X could have made it to the meeting. The key message here is that there needs to be an integration of the services available in the wire area network with those available in the PANs such that the network can transfer data to the real end points.