To capture the essence of these challenging problems in a timely manner a feature topic in IEEE Personal Communications magazine has been proposed. Mechanisms used in traditional networks such as buffer management, routing, error control, flow and congestion control will continue to deserve careful treatment in building the next generation Internet. Additional dimensions of complexity emerge across all layers of the protocol stack as end systems connect over wireless links and networks must provide effective mobility solutions. For instance, the treatment of heterogeneous flows on wireless links to assure QoS in spite of fading while fulfilling the requirement for energy economy is a difficult question. Coupling the pace of data on wireless links with backbone congestion control also poses a significant challenge.
Mobility introduces further challenges in areas never fully understood or resolved in the past.
Satellites will also play an important role in providing Mobile Internet services. Handover among such different technologies must reconcile varying transmission, authentication, management and addressing capabilities across heterogeneous systems raising challenging research problems. Alternative approaches to support mobility and service continuity, despite discontinuity of communication, ranging from Mobile IP to session and application layer solutions, require careful consideration. The Mobile Internet will offer advanced commerce opportunities necessitating the need to investigate solutions for charging and billing that are optimized for a mobile and wireless environment. Last but not the least, the Mobile Internet is creating a platform for a new class of intelligent, location dependent, and context aware applications.