Innovative communications for a better future (2010)

By Lingyang Song, Yan Zhang, Nirwan Ansari, Jianwei Huang and Bechir Hamdaoui, Guest Editors Welcome to this special issue of Wiley Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC). The title of this special issue literally adopts the theme of the 2010 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC 2010), as it attempts to represent the ‘best’ of IWCMC 2010 by soliciting representative quality research works presented at the conference for inclusion in this issue via a rigorous selection and review process. This special issue covers a quite broad range of topics of wireless networks, wireless communications, and mobile computing, from the physical layer through application and system design. The goal of this special issue is to create a great opportunity for high impact research from both the mobile communications industry and academia to present and discuss new trends, developments, emerging technologies, and new industrial standards. To guarantee the quality, in this special issue, we have selectively collected 11 expanded papers from the proceedings of IWCMC 2010, and clustered them in three groups: three papers dealing with physical layer aspects, six papers investigating MAC and network layer issues, and two papers focusing on applications as well as prototypes. Detailed overview of the selected works is given below. The first group includes three papers, which provide physical layer results for wireless communications and mobile computing. The first paper, by Takeda et al., studies joint transmit and iterative receive frequency-domain equalization for DS-CDMA. In the proposed scheme, simple one-tap frequency-domain equalization at the transmitter and iterative one-tap FDE at the receiver are jointly performed using the common knowledge of channel state information, and at the same time taking channel estimation constraints into account. The paper by Fan et al. investigates the relay position selection problem for the diamond network over Nakagami-m fading channels. This paper discusses the impact on the performance of diamond network caused by the relays' position for a general Nakagami-m fading channel, which extends the previous work for a special Rayleigh fading case, and gives clear restrictions of their positions based on the requirement of the throughput improvement and network stability. The third paper, by Stuber et al., studies outage probability for cooperative diversity with selective combining in cellular networks. The analysis mainly focuses on outage probability for amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward cooperative diversity systems with selective combining, for the case of a log-normal Nakagami faded desired signal and log-normal Rayleigh faded co-channel interferers. The second group of papers mainly investigates MAC and network layer issues. The first paper, by Wong et al., deals with switching cost minimization in the IEEE 802.16e mobile WiMAX sleep mode operation in order to improve the battery lifetime of the mobile station. The paper proposes a novel approach to resolve this issue by making a heuristic decision during the listening interval to minimize the switching frequency for better energy efficiency. The second paper by Lin et al. studies Multicast Broadcast Service (MBS) zone configuration for wireless multicast and broadcast service. Two schemes, the overlapping scheme and the enhanced overlapping scheme, are provided for more flexible MBS zone configuration to achieve better performance for MBS in terms of QoS and radio resource utilization. The third paper, by Kumar et al., investigates the issue of trust advisory and its establishment in mobile networks, with application to ad hoc networks, including DTNs. The authors utilized encounters in novel ways, noticing that mobility provides opportunities to build proximity, location and similarity based trust. The fourth paper by Znati et al. proposes robust multicast routing algorithms for mobile wireless networks by considering more practical challenges, e.g., the mobility of nodes, the tenuous status of communication links, limited resources, and indefinite knowledge of the network topology. This paper addresses these difficulties by providing a framework and architecture with proactive and reactive components to support multicasting to guarantee reliability and efficiency of end-to-end packet delivery. The fifth paper, by Pu et al., redefines the fairness concept regarding the application utility for time-constraint flows and then presents novel utility-based fair bandwidth sharing approaches in vehicular networks. Accordingly, two practical bandwidth-sharing schemes are provided for transferring data by fast-moving wireless nodes such as vehicles in order to guarantee QoS. The sixth paper, by Ali et al., provides a MAC protocol for cognitive wireless sensor body area networks to increases the critical traffic throughput. The proposed cognitive radio based MAC protocol prioritizes the critical packets access to the transmission medium by transmitting them with higher power while transmitting lower priority packets using lower transmission power. The third group consists of two papers focusing on applications and prototypes. The first paper by Fantacci et al. introduces a novel communication infrastructure for emergency management to interconnect several heterogeneous systems and provide multimedia access to groups of people involved in emergency operations as foreseen by the In.Sy.Eme. (Integrated System for Emergency) project. The main scope of the In.Sy.Eme system is to facilitate functional integration of new technologies with actual or off-the-shelf technologies to provide fast responses to any emergency situations and efficient use of all available resources. The second paper, by Manfrin et al., demonstrates the CalRAdio-Based advanced Spectrum Scanner, an open platform developed to monitor the ISM 2.4-2.499 GHz band, and reveals opportunities for a better utilization of the available spectrum resources. This solution provides sensing capabilities while preserving the 802.11b standard compatibility on the CalRadio 1 platform. Moreover, it capitalizes on the ULLA framework to export spectrum occupancy information to prospective cognitive radio manager engines, through a standardized set of sensing APIs. In conclusion, this issue of WCMC offers a state-of-the-art view of recent advances in wireless network, wireless communications, and mobile computing. It also offers both academic and industry appeal—the former as a basis toward future research directions and the latter toward viable commercial applications. In the long term, innovative wireless communications and mobile computing techniques will be characterized by their criticalness in consumer, business, and government applications to enhance the development of the whole world in realizing a better future. Finally, we would like to thank all the authors who have submitted their papers for consideration for publishing their work in this issue. We would like to extend our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who spent much of their precious time reviewing all the papers. Their timely reviews and comments greatly helped us select the best papers in this special issue. We also would like to thank the devoted staff of Wiley for their high level of professionalism, and particularly express our gratitude to the Editor-in-Chief of WCMC, Professor Mohsen Guizani, for his advice, patience, and encouragement from the beginning until the final stage. We hope you will enjoy reading the great selection of papers in this issue.