Advanced Technologies in Wireless Internet and Communications Networks (Editorial for WICON 2011 Special Issue)

Abstract

Over the last two decades, wireless internet and communications networks have experienced an explosive growth in both the diversity of the techniques and its range of applications. Besides the traditional mobile communications services, current mobile communications networks can also provide internet access services. In order to provide higher data transmission rate, the 4th generation mobile communications systems, i.e., IMT-Advanced, have been developed and many advanced technologies, such as MIMO and OFDM, have been applied. The constantly developing wireless communications technologies also have enabled the extensive deployment of distributed wireless networks, such as the Ad Hoc networks. This kind of networks has applications in many important areas, such as military, healthcare, environment monitoring, and manufacturing. Due to the absence of central controllers, the distributed networks face many challenges. In recently years, radio spectrum has becoming exhausted because of the growing demands for wireless broadband communications. However, the traditional static spectrum allocation policy has prevented the spectrum utilization efficiency from further increasing. In order to overcome the spectrum shortage problem, cognitive wireless network, in which cognitive radio technique is applied, have drawn a great of research attentions. In the future wireless internet and communications networks, many advanced technologies, such as MIMO, OFDM, cognitive radio, distributed resource allocation/management, distributed admission control, etc., will be applied to satisfy the increasing demands for broadband wireless services. Our objectives for this special issue of ACM/Springer Mobile Networks & Applications are to collate and disseminate the most relevant achievements of research work on wireless network architectures, wireless access technologies, distributed admission control, advanced resource allocation/management, QoS guarantees, etc. In response to this call for papers, we have received a total of xx high-quality submissions, and 6 papers have been selected for publication after a rigorous review process. The first paper “Optimal Resource Allocation for Spectrum Sensing Based Cognitive Radio Networks with Statistical QoS Guarantees” by Y. Wang, P, Ren, Q. Du, and C. Zhang proposes an optimal resource allocation scheme for statistical QoS provisioning in spectrum sensing based cognitive radio networks subject to the average transmit and interference power constraints. The second paper “The Master–slave Stochastic Knapsack Modeling for Fully Dynamic Allocation” by S. Zhang, F. Yang, M. Zhao, and W. Zhou models the fully dynamic spectrum allocation scheme as a master–slave stochastic knapsack process, analyzes the equilibrium state transition, and derives the probability of blocking and forced termination for the secondary user. The third paper “A Method for Classifying Packets into Networks Flows Based on GHSOM” by H. Shi, T. Hamagami, H. Xu, P. Yu, and Y. Wu develops an intelligent network flow identifying method based on the neural network algorithm and suggests a new normalization for changing the raw network traffic to learn input vectors. The forth paper “Performance Improvement of the Precise Paging in CoLAC for 2G/3G Convergence Core Networks with Path Diversity” by Y. Su and X. Feng evaluates the system performance metrics in terms of handover success rate and P. Ren (*) Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China e-mail: pyren@mail.xjtu.edu.cn