editorial  at the same time that this special issue of wireless networks is being published, the next generation of wireless networks is coming to life. the fcc auction of the spectrumhad brought into the arena new players that are willing and able to take part in writing the wireless communications revolution in the us, and potentially elsewhere in the world. the price paid for the pcs spectrum, however, in addition to the infrastructure building cost, is adding up to billions of dollars. given the current market size of the cellular industry, the expected growth rate in cellular subscribers, the competitive aspect of this service sector and inevitable price decline, it becomes apparent that voice service alone is not a winning feasible business proposition for wireless operators to recoup the investment, let alone yield a profit. the clear competitive advantage therefore lies in the ability to offer advanced wireless services that combine multiple media types such as video and data in addition to voice. emerging technologies based on on-going research carry a great promise for shifts in the paradigm on which the cellular industry was built. these technologies include wireless atm and mobile multimedia.<\par>  in organizing this special issue around the theme of "wireless multimedia" we focus on research areas that will enable the above paradigm shift. we attempt to cover the research "spectrum" from transmission to transport protocols and mobile applications, in order to present a bright and compelling forecast of this industry as it emerges from the lab and enters the realm of competitive business and advanced mobile application. two invited papers in this special issue present state-of-the-art technology proposals in wireless networks. raychaudhuri proposes an atm-based wireless network capable of supporting integrated voice, video, and data services with quality of service control, and discusses design issues for major functional layers in the network. liu et al. propose and study multimode cdma with distributed queuing request update multiple access for multi-rate wireless packet networks which support an integrated mix of multimedia traffic. the proposed network incorporates a flexible multiplexing scheme for providing multi-rate transmission and an efficient demand assignment for wireless access and scheduling.<\par>  the contribution from naghshineh and acampora focuses on call admission control for wireless/mobile networks supporting multimedia traffic. ananticipatory hand-off control mechanism and an adaptive link partitioning scheme are proposed by lee in an adapted reserved services framework for mobile connections of multimedia traffic. liu and el zarki propose a two-class data partitioning and unequal error protection scheme to make best use of limited channel bandwidth. the performance issues of a typical cdma wireless link using protocol stack are investigated in the contribution from bao, with focus on the dynamics of tcp and rlp. a two-step plan is proposed by delli priscoli for a smooth migration from the current gsm system to the third generation system in order to reuse most of the existing technologies and infrastructures. finally, iera et al. present an overall research work dealing with an effective management of multimedia and multi- requirement services in the third generation mobile radio systems.<\par>  we would like to thank all reviewers for their efforts to ensure this issue a high standard of quality. the support of editor-in-chief professor imrich chlamtac is greatly appreciated.  george makhoul zhensheng zang