You may already use a PAN or Personal Area Network either at home or on the job. In this case, you would have wired connections between your PDA, digital camera, cell phone and other devices, all connecting to a PC. In this manner, you exchange information such as synchronizing your calendar between the PDA and PC or uploading pictures from your camera to the PC's hard drive. Of course, to accomplish these tasks, you must establish a physical connection between these devices before such transfers can occur.
A WPAN accomplishes the same tasks but without the need to establish wired connections between devices. A key concept in involved in WPANs is called plugging in. The idea is that as you bring a device such as your PDA within range of the WPAN (which would be centered around your workstation), a radio frequency connection would be made automatically and the information exchange would begin without any specific effort being made on behalf of the user. The range is usually up to about ten meters although special devices can be linked to a central server over several kilometers.
A typical use for this sort of wireless networking would be taking an inventory of merchandise in a warehouse environment using a portable, handheld device. Let's say the user is inventorying car parts in a dockside warehouse in San Francisco. Once the data is recorded in the hand held unit, the user takes it to a computer station where the data is uploaded to a computer linked to the Internet. The data can then be sent to a remote storage server in Milwaukee.
The devices used in a WPAN environment are probably familiar to you and include Palm, Bluetooth, and Blackberry solutions.
| There has been a patent dispute in the courts recently involving Blackberry devices, putting the use of Blackberry in legal jeopardy. |
Palms tend to offer more features and services than Blackberry, but offers access to a wide variety of functions. In addition to PDAs, you can find Bluetooth used with cell phones, pagers, portable headsets, GPS units and multi-function devices.