For more than 20 years, Network World has been the premier provider of information, intelligence and insight for network and IT executives responsible for the digital nervous systems of large organizations. Readers are responsible for designing, implementing and managing the voice, data and video systems their companies use to support everything from business critical applications to employee collaboration and electronic commerce.

This book includes a number of selected papers from the PRO-VE '07 Conference, providing a comprehensive overview of recent advances in various Collaborative Networks domains. It covers trust aspects, performance and value systems, VO breeding environments, VO creation, e-contracting, collaborative architectures and frameworks, professional virtual communities, interoperability issues, business benefits, and case studies and applications in industry and services.

With the fast development of the Internet, we are experiencing a shift from the traditional sharing of information and applications as the main purpose of the Web to an emergent paradigm, which locates people at the very center of networks and exploits the value of people's connections, relations, and collaboration. Social networks are also playing a major role in the dynamics and structure of intelligent Web-based networking and collaborative systems. Virtual campuses, virtual communities, and organizations strongly leverage intelligent networking and collaborative systems by a great variety of formal and informal electronic relations, such as business-to-business, peer-to-peer, and many types of online collaborative learning interactions, including the emerging e-learning systems. This has resulted in entangled systems that need to be managed efficiently and in an autonomous way. In addition, latest and powerful technologies based on grid and wireless infrastructure as well as cloud computing are currently enhancing collaborative and networking applications a great deal but also facing new issues and challenges. The principal purpose of the research and development community is to stimulate research that will lead to the creation of responsive environments for networking and, at longer-term, the development of adaptive, secure, mobile, and intuitive intelligent systems for collaborative work and learning. The aim of the book “Advances on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems” is to provide latest research findings, innovative research results, methods, and development techniques from both theoretical and practical perspectives related to intelligent social networks and collaborative systems, intelligent networking systems, mobile collaborative systems, secure intelligent cloud systems, and so on as well as to reveal synergies among various paradigms in such a multi-disciplinary field intelligent collaborative systems.

This book focuses on providing a detailed and practical explanation of key existing and emerging wireless networking technologies and trends,while minimizing the amount of theoretical background information. The book also goes beyond simply presenting what the technology is, but also examines why the technology is the way it is, the history of its development, standardization, and deployment. The book also describes how each technology is used, what problems it was designed to solve, what problems it was not designed to solve., how it relates to other technologies in the marketplace, and internetworking challenges faced withing the context of the Internet, as well as providing deployment trends and standardization trends. Finally, this book decomposes evolving wireless technologies to identify key technical and usage trends in order to discuss the likely characteristics of future wireless networks.