Introduction to the minitrack on wireless personal area networks (WPANs)

Summary form only given. Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) are short to very short-range wireless networks that can be used to exchange information between devices in the reach of a person. WPANs can be used to replace cables between computers and their peripherals, to establish communities helping people do their everyday work making them more productive, or to establish location aware services. It is predicted that not only will most PDAs, phones, laptops include WPAN technology but that the number of small WPAN enabled devices (e.g., pens, cameras, headsets, various sensors) will soon outnumber the computers on the Internet. The best example representing WPANs is the recent industry standard: Bluetooth, other examples include Spike (for real time gaming - proprietary technology), and Zigbee. The IEEE 802 committee has also realized the importance of short-range wireless networking and initiated the establishment of the IEEE 802.15 working group to standardize protocols and interfaces for wireless personal area networking. The interest to submit papers to this mini-track was enormous, and not surprisingly strongly biased to Bluetooth and its application. We have accepted six papers for this mini-track (an acceptance rate of about 40%). The first paper in this mini-track deals with mobile peer-to-peer environments while the remaining five papers focus on Bluetooth. More precisely, the second paper provides a description of a security application of Bluetooth, the third paper introduces a novel scatternet formation algorithm, and the fifth paper deals with scheduling in piconets. Papers four and six investigate the inquiry procedure of Bluetooth.