This compiled book is from a European Union (EU)-funded project, User-Centric Wireless Local Loop (ULOOP), and is an excellent summary of user-centric networks (UCNs). Such networks have become pervasive across the modern world, whereby users are able to share resources, network access, and Internet services with others in their immediate communities or groups. While such exchanges are often from a social, economic, or technical perspective, from a connectivity perspective these networks help bridge the last remaining gaps in service availability and accessibility. Hence they are effective in helping close the digital divide if they can be appropriately utilized for larger societal good. Users in such a network transform from being a user of the Internet to a provider of a limited set of services, thereby becoming an active hop in the network, that is, an active node in the service distribution chain. The book is split into five parts, with each part focusing on the main investigation themes of this project.

Part 1 focuses on models and architectures for UCNs and UCN environments. The chapters in this part discuss home networks, routing, and real-world examples, and summarize the challenges faced by UCNs. In the home network chapter (chapter 1), the authors highlight cooperative trust management, resource management, issues of backward compatibility, and mobility aspects such as tracking and handovers. In the second chapter, the authors summarize UCN living examples and the different architectures these bring forward. They also highlight the current limitations of UCNs with regard to technical and economic aspects, and promote the need to appropriately address robustness and managing incentives. In the routing chapter, the authors highlight the need for routing requirements within the UCN context and discuss issues such as resource constraints, backward compatibility, and the need for metrics and UCNs.

Part 2 probes deeper into supporting issues such as trust management and cooperation within UCNs. The fourth chapter focuses on developing a trust management support model for a context-aware platform. The next two chapters discuss a trust management framework without strong security associations, and the design of a trust-based virtual currency system. This set of chapters is rather weak and not as exhaustive as it needs to be with respect to real applicative illustrations.

Part 3, chapters 7 through 12, focuses on UCN resource management topics. Chapter 7 summarizes cooperative networking, including strategies such as reciprocity, rewards, and mixed incentives, while chapter 8 focuses on improving fairness and user quality of experiences. Chapter 9 presents a thorough introduction to cooperative relay scheduling and a MAC cooperative protocol (RelaySpot) to increase the performance of dynamic wireless networks. The topics of resource allocation (chapter 10) and autonomous resource allocation (Chapter 11) are addressed next, and validated on a testbed through simulations. The next chapter (12) presents a framework for automated load balancing; again, it is verified by testbed experimentation.

The topic of mobility in UCNs is addressed in Part 4 (chapters 13 through 15). They specifically address challenges and the need for decentralized requirements for mobility support (chapter 13), mobility estimation for evolving Internet architecture due to the emergence of distributed mobility in the UCN context (chapter 14), and an overview of various mobility management solutions designed and developed within the ULOOP project (chapter 15).

Part 5 concludes the work with a market perspective, including a survey of market analysis and opportunities for business exploitation (chapter 16) and a hypothetical business case study specific to ULOOP (chapter 17).

In summary, this is a good collection of research white papers (referred to as chapters in this review) on the various emergent research directions for UCNs. It will be good reading for students and practitioners interested in UCNs for future study and research.