Awareness networking in wireless environments

This article presented a platform for awareness networking, targeted for distribution of locally relevant control information between nodes in heterogeneous wireless environments. This concept can be leveraged in many different ways and purposes, as shown with the examples given, which range from network discovery, to functionalities required in cognitive radio systems to distributed services facilitating localized mobile social networking. Although a wide range of applications can be envisioned, the same basic solution for distributing locally relevant control information applies to all of them. Future research work on awareness networking is required on multiple areas, covering the technical details of the connectivity solution, details of the distributed algorithms, functionalities, and services, and the regulatory support required for their realization.